L U S T,
f o a m,
&
M DN GHT BLUE
Caroline Cooledge McCraw
(1) L U S T — a found language piece that rearranges text from St. Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica, wherein his section on lust questionably ranks the sinfulness of intimate acts. This piece is an incantation, a seduction, using Aquinas’s own words to enter and engage in conversation about our respective legs [Latin root: “law”] with a randomized [chant][prayer][whisper in his ear] for each of his six species of lustful vice.
(2) f o a m — a love poem.
(3) M DN GHT BLUE — built around a personal archive of field recordings collected over the span of four years and four continents, this video (07:25) explores what becomes of memory, how memory takes up space, and how the memory of feeling // the feeling of memory is transferred and transformed between one person and another when words cannot suffice.
Artist’s Statement
My work is concerned with the futility & possibility of language, how language fills a space, the digital voice, how words are transferred & what is the loss, translation, mediation, the act of naming, the future of words :: I worry about the ethics of writing, the damage of language, the trade-off between accessibility and experimentation :: I am curious about collection and extraction as a poetic act, hierarchies of information and experience, infinitude :: I am interested in cross-pollinating formal, conceptual, and visual structures as a way to investigate the social structures that inform language [& silence], finding corridors for empathy within the cracks of language’s instability, creating a site that accommodates the urgently unsayable.