We Hold Back the Night Caroline McQuarrie

Reworking family portraits with textile interventions, We Hold Back The Night probes the ideologies represented by our domestic documentation of times gone by. Questioning both the social construction of house as ‘home’ and the phoniness of the standard smiley ‘family’ photo Caroline McQuarrie draws attention to the artificial memorialisation of these moments. But all is not doom and gloom. McQuarrie’s playful use of domestic arts and crafts is nostalgic and celebratory, prompting memories that help us form our own ‘stories’, she explains.

“It is believed that the experience of shaping our own story becomes what is truth for us in our memories. The story we tell does not simply re-play old memories; it is constructed from the point of view of now and how we connect and explain through this. The story of our identity changes as we grow and gather experience”

McQuarrie is currently a senior tutor in the Photography Department of Massey University’s School of Fine Arts where she completed her MFA. She has recently shown work in Etiquette for the Homesick at the Michael Hirschfeld Gallery at the City Gallery in Wellington.

Presented alongside Vicky Browne The Orator Vs. The Warrior