About Carrie:
Carrie Smith Libman is an artist living and working in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She spent time in the Midwest, Southeast, and abroad before returning to Pittsburgh where she lives with her husband and three young children. She received her BFA in Sculpture from Washington University in St. Louis and her MFA in Sculpture from the University of Florida where she also taught Sculpture and Drawing. Her work is included in private collections across the US, and she is an active member of Pittsburgh’s art community through Associated Artists of Pittsburgh.
As a compliment to her studio practice, Carrie works in healthcare strategy. She finds endless inspiration in the intersections and overlaps of her creative practice, corporate America, and motherhood.
Say hello! carrie.s.libman@gmail.com
About the work:
My work is about making space to process experiences. With a background in sculpture, I use found imagery, metaphor, pattern, and the artifacts of daily life as building materials. Cut and torn images are collaged onto painted panels, then worked back into with acrylic paint, pencil, crayon, and pastel to create textured and materially rich 2-D surfaces that join found and painted elements. In my current work, I invite my children and their art supplies into the studio. I trace and balance their marks with my own intentional mark making, a call and response. I braid and fold their clothes, collage the post-it note to-dos of our life, and wrap together outgrown toys. The final pieces become an artifact navigating these early years of motherhood, of holding tight and letting go, of learning when to lead and when to follow.
My work is personal, but the experiences are shared. Parenting is hard and rewarding. Relationships are beautiful and painful. Transitions are about loss and rebirth. Happiness is sweeter when you have experienced the other. You can’t control the weather.
About the work:
Seedlings (2023)
From the first small kick of my ribs, I have been hyperaware of my role as a mother. Be the environment. Be the soil, the soft landing, the sun and the rain, the armor and the reflection. Hold lightly your hopes and dreams for your children. Cultivate, like a gardener, the environment for them to chase and realize their own. In the work, household artifacts are woven, tied, and knotted together. Drawings, wrapping paper, grocery lists, and to dos are roughly collaged and worked back into with crayons, paint, and pencil, active mark marking. Out of the collaged masses sprout seedlings, new and undefined. Confident, eager, and fragile all the same. The fledgling, unfinished leaves are as much myself as they are my children, as they are any of us, stretching toward the sun because of, sometimes in spite of, our gardeners.
About the work: Houseplants (2022)
Houseplants is an exploration of motherhood. The work is a collaboration with my daughter. We paint together in my studio, pure creativity and experimentation. The panels are wild and free, just like her. At night, when she and her brothers are asleep, I carefully cut out images of houseplants while I watch them on the monitor. I match these curated plants to a companion panel and offset them with my own intentional mark making, an act of balancing spontaneity with the right amount of structure and care. The pieces become a call and response. They are about motherhood and childhood, holding tight and letting go, navigating when to lead and when to follow, and a point in time artifact capturing these early years.
About the work: Gardeners (2021)
Gardeners is about both looking back and looking forward, about motherhood and parenting, yes, but more about the new relationships we form with ourselves as we become parents. Throughout the work floral subject and patterned or painted background vie for attention. Symmetry is ever present, but always slightly off, never perfect, a balance between the organic and the structured, a metaphor for well laid plans and reality. There is a focus on the new and fresh floral centerpiece but always present competition from an active background, who you were and who you are becoming, that two things can be true at the same time and that the only constant is growth.