Italian artist based in London
Her practice involves textile manipulation, printing, painting, photography, video, and performance.
Mazzolari’s work is inspired by psychoanalysis, intuition, cognition, human behavior, and emotional development.
Mazzolari (b. 1981 Milan) started her early artistic career in 1996, initially working as a street photographer, and soon becoming a creative founding member of PIG magazine in Milan with Simon Beckerman. Mazzolari studied at Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti Milano NABA (1999 – 2001) and at London’s Chelsea College of Art (2000 – 03). Mazzolari’s time as a designer involved a complete immersion into the Italian Jacquard factories, where she worked with industrial machines and a large team of local craft women, this craft still informs the core of her practice today. Her ongoing video and photographic research of women and their moving image portraits, I Dance Alone, We dance alone together, are equally dominant into Mazzolari’s multidisciplinary practice. Based in London since 2014, Mazzolari works exclusively using all textile manipulations, painting, photography, video, and performance. Her ongoing series of contemporary abstract tapestries, the Fields, is the materialization of elusive states of mind. A depiction of metaphorical inner landscapes, these were initially inspired by Kurt Lewin’s field theory and Carl Jung’s scripts of the collective unconscious. They have a distinctive grey herringbone stitch exoskeleton that interacts with light, creating changing depths and luminous illusions. All maps are hand-embroidered and hand-dyed. Carolina makes these works with the help of ‘Fine Cell Work’ a UK registered charity that employs and rehabilitates prisoners with needlework. Her work is being showcased internationally and both her videos and early tapestries are in the permanent collection of the MONA museum, Tasmania, Hobart.
“While the tapestries and the mixed media works belong in this feminist story, the textile pieces also continue a different strand of the avant-garde, engaging in the struggle to find a way of visualizing inner states. Mazzolari’s Emotional Field artefacts are the materialisation of elusive states of mind; the figures of “Isis” and “Pan” are textured apparitions – portraits – in this world of otherworldly beings.” —Marina Warner
