Caroline McQuarrie

Caroline McQuarrie is a contemporary artist and photographer. Born in 1975, she lives in Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Wellington.

Caroline is an interdisciplinary artist who has long been exploring personal and familial histories and the role that photography and hand-crafted textile might play in interrogating these narratives. Curiosity about what is tangible and what is intangible, what traces remain, and whose lived experiences are valued enough to be recorded are strong drivers for her practice.

Caroline has spent several years photographing sites of 1800s mining industry—tunnels, tailings, inclines, paths—places of man-altered hills, rivers and bush. These are sites of former prosperity, of once bustling industries, and sites of change and trauma. Caroline often focuses her gaze on the historical and ecological legacies of the area around her family home in Te Tai Poutini, the West Coast of the South Island.

In her embroidered and textile projects, Caroline enjoys bringing to light lesser known or documented stories, particularly those of early settler Pākehā women and their families. These experiences and stories were more domestic and ephemeral, often overlooked, and now mostly lost to the annals of history.