Caroline McQuarrie

McQuarrie was born in 1975[1] in Greymouth, on the West Coast of the South Island. Her father Bob McQuarrie was a potter and her mother Barbara McQuarrie a textile artist.[2] McQuarrie enjoyed drawing from an early age, and was influenced by family friends photographer Frank Simpson and potter Daphne Simpson who together ran Coast Craft in Greymouth; Daphne taught her to draw and paint, and she studied photography and painting in her final year of high school.[2] At the University of Canterbury, she studied photography, completing a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1997.[2]

No Town, Te Uru Waitākere Contemporary Gallery, Titirangi, 2015

After graduating, McQuarrie worked in photography laboratories in the United Kingdom, learning photo retouching and Adobe Photoshop. After returning to New Zealand in 2002 she began a Master of Fine Arts at Massey University in Wellington, completing it in 2005; her focus at this point was sculptural textile work. By this time she was also working in the university's photography department as a tutor, a job which became full time. In 2010, she was an artist in residence at Samuel Marsden Collegiate School for five weeks.[2] As of 2023, McQuarrie is working at Massey University's College of Creative Arts Toi Rauwhārangi in Wellington, where she is Senior Lecturer in Photography.[3]

His labour is gouged into the land (2021), from The New Sun exhibition, Jhana Millers Gallery, Wellington

McQuarrie's work often explores personal and family histories, particular of early Pākehā settler women, combining photography and textiles in her art.[1] One of her photography projects has been sites of former mining settlements such as Waiuta in the West Coast region.[1]

She has used alternative photography techniques like cyanotype and photograms, and incorporates crochet, sewing, and stitching into her work.[2] McQuarrie counts as her influences the photographers Anne Ferran and Cathy Tuato'o Ross and the textile artist Vanessa Crowe.[2]

With her partner, photographer Shaun Matthews, McQuarrie explored in the 2018 show Fearful Prospects the 1846 journey of explorer Thomas Brunner and his Māori guides from Nelson to the West Coast and back. It included enormous fabric-printed photographs taken with a pinhole camera, embroidered samplers with texts from Brunner's diary, and a collection of pāraerae sandals woven from harakeke.[4]

Her 2021 show The New Sun – her first in a dealer gallery – included linen samplers embroidered with the imagined words of pioneer women, complemented by colour photographs of the landscapes transformed by mining.[5]

• This is the First Day of My Life (2008–09), a floor work made of recycled wool, cotton, and acrylic[2][6]

• Artifact. 19 June – 21 July 2012: Blue Oyster Art Project Space, Dunedin[7]
• No Town. 24 April 2014 – 23 August 2015: Aratoi, Masterton; Carnegie Gallery, Hokitika; Left Bank Art Gallery, Greymouth; Te Uru Waitākere, Auckland.[8]
• Waiuta. 16 November – 10 December 2015: Plymouth University, UK.
• The New Sun. 11 February – 13 March 2021: Jhana Millers Gallery, Wellington[9]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Caroline McQuarrie.

• Artist website