CARA MACWILLIAM
Biography
Cara Macwilliam (b.1972) is a self-taught, disabled visual artist. She started being creative in 2018 during a severe relapse, stating that art allows her to travel in ways she no longer can, due to being mainly homebound. There is flow, energy and movement in her art, everything she says her illness has taken away. Macwilliam’s practice involves travelling into surreal landscapes and mythologies using watercolour, dip pens, textiles or clay. Each material adds a different dimension, with a lot of whimsical animism in her work. Always working from an automatic process with no planning or sketching, allows purely instinctive play, with her hand dancing in all directions, adding the marks, forming the clay or laying the stitch.
Of the ‘Energies’ series Cara says, "I refer to these as my energy drawings. They are created by hundreds of layers of watercolour pencils, which take hours to do. As with all my art they are automatic with no planning. Art transports me out of the mundane walls of my sick and housebound state, I drop away and off I travel. I have suffered a number of traumas and creating these drawings are such an anchor when I'm feeling emotional distress, they coalesce with my nervous system which creates an energetic shift within. It's like every stroke laid down is a moment of love for my sensitized body, touching every fibre and cell of my being. I love the positivity they exude once finished and it never ceases to amaze me how much of an emotional charge has been enacted at the end.”
In 2022 Cara received a DYCP grant from Arts Council England and is currently in a phase of R&D with her drawings and learning projection mapping to take them to a new level and experience.
Cara at the College of Psychic Studies in London, 2022
Works
Click the thumbnails to see larger images and more details. Further artworks are available on request. Click on the button here to listen to an audio description by Harry Baxter, about the three different styles that Cara Macwilliam works within.
Selected Exhibitions
2023 Instinctive Energies, Mura Ma, Marple
2023 There’s Something in There, Halle Saint Pierre, Paris
2023 Why We Linger, Darbyshire, London
2023 Outsider Art Fair, Metropolitan Pavilion, New York
2022 Creative Spirits, College of Psychic Studies, London
2022 Oxmarket Open, Oxmarket Contemporary, Chichester
2022 Outsider Art Fair, Metropolitan Pavilion in New York with Jennifer Lauren Gallery
2021 Shapes and Patterns in Creativity, The Yellow Edge Gallery
