COLUMBIA — Caroline Clark fell back in love with creating when her toddler became obsessed with coral reefs. She had been struggling with severe postpartum depression, and she hadn’t felt that spark in awhile.
“I felt like what started pulling me out of it was feeling curious again, and so when I started back with sculpture and ceramics again the first thing that came out was a coral reef,” Clark said. “It's so many different life forms with different priorities depending on each other, which is just a pretty blatant metaphor for people.”
Clark now sells her coral and mushroom inspired pieces as the artist behind Revisionist Studio. She produces functional sculptures like mugs and vases, meant to integrate into the homes of her customers.
She moved to New York after getting an undergraduate degree in English and Spanish. She met her husband teaching in the Bronx. She never planned to move back to South Carolina.
Artist Caroline Clark sculpts in her workspace, Revisionist Studio.
Clark was raised Buddhist on her family’s farm in Camden, where she lived with her mother, her aunts and their families and her grandmother. She moved back after her mother was diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer's disease.
“I credit almost all of my good qualities to my mother. But mainly, the one that serves me best in ceramics is knowing that I'll figure it out. Whatever it is, I'll figure it out, and that's something that she really instilled in myself and my sister," Clark said. "Everything that goes wrong in the kiln, I'll figure it out next time."
After falling back into creativity while learning about coral with her son, Clark fell further in love with ceramics when she returned to South Carolina to care for her mother.
“I realized that I was going to need some sort of creative outlet, something to not be this intense thing," the artist said. "So I started taking classes again, and just really fell hard into it this time.”
Clark’s work pulls from magical realism and Clark’s search for joy and community. Magical realism is a writing style that combines realistic narratives with elements of magic and the surreal.
“Magical realism has always felt right to me, in a way. This notion that it's not creating a different world, It's magic that's woven into our world,” Clark said. “I grew up on this farm in the middle of the woods and was always surrounded by nature and natural processes, a lot of which seemed like magic, especially fungus. There's nothing, and then it rains and all of a sudden you've got all these magical shapes.”
Artist Caroline Clark creates whimsical and functional sculptures under the banner Revisionist Studio.
Visually, Clark is inspired by mycelium networks, mushrooms and coral reefs because of the connectivity and hope they represent. She said that sometimes art critics and galleries don’t take her work seriously because they think it is too pretty and joyful to be important.
“I really feel like joy and those community networks, how we interact with each other, are equally worthy of exploring and equally complex. I think joy is just as complex as trauma,” Clark said.
Since Clark moved back with her husband and son, she has focused on building community for herself and other artists in Columbia. She felt like Columbia has an arts scene, but a lot of artists don’t talk to each other.
“I wasn't crazy about coming back, and I've had to intentionally build a community for the first time,” Clark said. “It started with my other makers and some of these markets that I was doing. It's expanding as I am working with various people and organizations to make Columbia better for the arts.”
She met fellow artists Stacey Black and Jennifer Elmore at art markets throughout South Carolina.
Black runs Bee Bottom Art, where she sells detailed miniatures of animals and landscapes. She admires how easily Clark’s pieces weave into her life as functional objects.
“When I look at her art, I see Caroline in it but also I see the time it took for her to make the pieces, because there's so many different intricacies of her artwork,” Black said. “I'm just really impressed with how she creates and so when I see her artwork in my house, or I drink out of her mug, it just makes me feel good.”
Artist Caroline Clark creates whimsical and functional sculptures under the banner Revisionist Studio.
Elmore is the machine embroidery artist behind Southern Fried Stitching. She's witnessed firsthand Clark trying of bring Columbia’s art community closer together. “A person of action, especially within the arts community, can be a real rarity," Elmore said.
“But Caroline is a person who is a doer, and that I think is something else that's really special about her.”
Clark is on the committee of Artista Vista, a spring festival celebrating the arts in Columbia. She will be running their market this spring, which will include live demonstrations. She is also partnering with Columbia Likes Art to create groups for artists to meet one another, discuss business and foster creativity.
“Part of my work that I'm doing now that's not in the studio is trying to create those mycelium networks here of the different things that have different priorities, still working to support each other,” Clark said.
