London Yoga in
Camden & Islington

ART

In the last decade I started a new life, studying art and yoga, after a long professional life in television as a documentary film-maker, producer, commissioning editor and executive producer. I am now just coming to the end of a BA degree in Fine Art at Central St. Martin's, London.

bone-dancer, 2004

Exhibitions so far

2005: Hoathly Hill Studio, group show, East Grinstead
2006: Art Party, group show, London
2008: Secret Lives, group show, London
2008: Uncommon Ground, group show, London
2008: Carried Away, group show, London

pink soapstone, 2007

Artist's statement

My practice is stone carving, abstract organic forms that are connected with nature. The aesthetic of working the stone is important to me in itself, so that there is a wish in the viewer to touch, sense and experience the stone itself. And the piece of stone, whether it be hard as marble or softer like alabaster, white or coloured like soapstone, is but one element of the story I wish to tell, according to how the piece is placed in an installation and a created context. My story, it may not be yours. I am the author of only my story, which is in some way connected with the self and with loss, both individual and universal… and Jewishness. The work I hope opens a door to your story, to one that touches you in some way.

torso, 2006

Case History

case history, 2008

Many of us probably have special affection for a particular suitcase, box, or desk where we have kept important things safe over the years. This writing case which has accompanied me for over 50 years is my sentimental object. It started out as a gift when I went to boarding school in the late 1950s. Contact with home was limited except for letters, a compulsory letter that had to be dragged out of me every Sunday from the writing pad kept in this case…….

As I grew up, the case then became the recipient of all my seemingly important documents. It holds my mother's last brave letters to me, my dear father's only letter he ever wrote to me, his little address book written in illegible squiggles, my parents naturalisation papers when they became British citizens, my father's stripes from the Czech home guard in Britain during the 2nd. WW, and my endless results, badges of honour for passing through the British education system in such a way that makes the child of refugees fit into the new country, my old passports, my birth certificate, my NHS number.

I rarely look inside it nowadays, yet it will always accompany me with its traces of the past and its few bureacratic details of the present. The pink, fleshy, smooth and partly broken soapstone I carved represents something beyond the bureaucratic. It is the fragile self that lives behind the paperwork, the inner life that is kept hidden away, waiting to be discovered, to reveal itself, living in a totally different realm from the paper traces required of us.

Caroline Pick
June 2008