“My method,” says Caroline Josephs, PhD, “is to allow emergence… to work into an unknown, watch carefully what appears, work with that.” What strongly emerges in her work is a passion for nature and for the indigenous people of her native Australia. Working with a palette that leans toward shades evoking earth and water, her paintings show nature as both a spiritual and a physical force. Her compositional style, which echoes the forms found in Australian Aboriginal art, is equally tied to the natural world. And nature even plays a role in how Josephs creates her works. She will rub textures from trees or rocks onto paper, and then incorporate those paper pieces into her collaged works. But she transforms nature — and casts it in a modern light — by adding hints of brighter colors into her images. Reds, blues or oranges often animate the artist’s compositions, giving them a contemporary feel.
Having travelled and lived in widely varied locales, such as India, Italy, Japan, Bhutan and England, Josephs now lives and works in Sydney, frequently exploring the vast remote areas of her continent, immersing herself in bush, beach, mountain and the particularities of a single rock or tree trunk. The result is a body of work in which the universal and the particular visually collapse into each other.