Sean Caulfield

Available Works

Sean Caulfield and Akiko Taniguchi have each produced a body of related prints that look to classical mythology as motivation in order to explore themes of transformation, transience and regeneration. Investigating a common visual language the artists have developed compositions that utilize biomorphic and organic shapes that reference the natural world. Their images often move between abstraction and representation creating a shifting quality in which narratives and associations to the real world are implied, but are left in an open-ended and unresolved state.

Although Caulfield and Taniguchi have worked together closely, each artist has approached their work from a slightly different perspective. Caulfield has developed a suite of prints that, in addition to classical mythology and literature, have drawn on the history of scientific and medical illustration for motivation. From this research Caulfield has created imagined landscapes populated by enigmatic objects that refer to both mechanistic and naturalistic forms in order to explore themes of mutation, metamorphosis and biology/technology dichotomies. Although the work looks to the past for inspiration, its merging of mechanistic and organic languages is intended to point viewers towards a contemporary context in which advancements in technology are rapidly changing our relationship to the natural world, biology, and our own bodies. Read more from exhibition statement...

Caufield, Professor of Printmaking at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, has developed a poetic, visual language from a variety of elements. He draws on industrial objects found in the rural Midwest of Canada and the U.S., the landscapes from antique Asian and European artworks, our contemporary pop culture, and various literary and musical sources. From these diverse inspirations and using a variety of print processes, Caufield creates haunting, abstract, dreamlike landscapes that reflect our historic and shifting contemporary attitudes towards the landscape.

• Related Artist: Akiko Taniguchi

• Recent Exhibitions: Return to the Surface, September 2008; Aqueous, September 2005