Caitlin Peck

Year of birth: Born in 1988.
Where do you live: From rural Pennsylvania. Living in Philadelphia and the surrounding area since 2011.
Your education:
BFA in Drawing & Painting from Pennsylvania State University.
MFA in Studio Art from Moore College of Art & Design.
Website | Instagram

Your artwork often explores metamorphosis and transformation. What inspired you to focus on these themes in your art?

Changing the heads and the faces of these figures started as a means to literally illustrate a “headspace” – to bring the internal to the external. We all have these things inside of us – emotions, anxiety, memories – and they determine how we relate to the world around us, people around us, and ourselves. I find that by removing the faces, more viewers relate and insert themselves in some narrative within my work and develop that on their own. 

Caitlin Peck | Conversations with you | 2020

The cocoons in your work represent both protection and change. How do you balance these contrasting elements visually?

I wanted to show these ideas together by densely focusing the detail to one or two central areas. Anything could be happening outside of these lines, but it’s not shown because it’s not where the action is. It is all behind those braids and we, as viewers, are not privy to it. It is a private change that took work and effort to keep secret.

How do you approach the use of delicate lines and negative space to evoke such strong emotional responses in your viewers?

There is a term I heard many years ago that resonated so much with me: “horror vacui”. This is Latin for “fear of emptiness” or “horror of the void”. In periods of art history, this was expressed by filling every square inch of detail. I took a different spin because life is full of moments of emptiness or unknowns. I want to balance these concentrated pockets of details with the negative space around it – like a spotlight on a moment, a memory, a feeling. 

Caitlin Peck | Dammit | 2020

In your artist statement, you mention “warm, soft intimacy” and feelings of “entrapment and suffocation.” How do you navigate portraying such contrasting emotions in a single piece of art?

It’s almost like a Monkey’s Paw or be-careful-what-you-wish-for kind of fable. The seclusion and closeness can be comforting. By choosing to use braided hair, supposedly from the figures’ heads, gives even more intimacy to the narrative. But that also comes at the cost of isolation or feeling there’s no way out. 

Could you tell us more about your creative process? Do you begin with a specific idea in mind or let the work evolve organically?

A little bit of both. I wouldn’t say every piece is 100% clear as it comes to mind. I make lots of drafts of a piece – from sketch, to scale, rearranging parts by hand, drafting and redrafting until everything is exactly where I want it before transferring it all to final paper. So many redos leaves lots of space for mulling and letting the work tell me what it wants. 

Caitlin Peck | Could it have been all my fault | 2020

How do you think the process of self-reflection and human connection plays into the metamorphosis you explore in your artwork?

I believe a lot of us are the same on the inside. We have insecurities, worries, relationships, and memories. I like leaving an open-endedness so that viewers can make their own connections and stories with the art. These figures in perhaps mid-metamorphosis or hybrid leave the most space for that. I’m inspired by the elements of the human experience that make us the most human: our innermost thoughts, our failing memories, our dependence, our isolation.

Caitlin Peck | The goal was never you become me | 2021

Your works seem to teeter on the edge of humor and sensitivity. How do you incorporate humor into such serious and intimate subject matter?

Speaking of the human experience – life is humor! And it’s messy and it’s sweet and it’s sad and it’s simple and complicated. That is the goal, to make work with just enough push of a narrative. And sometimes, that means getting a little cheeky.