Caroline Wendling's work explores ideas of place and belonging through layered projects that draw on history and explore local myths, inviting re-imagings of sites. She attempts to give material form to the complex interconnectedness of our mental landscapes and the actual space we inhabit. Through this exploration she hopes to link memories with future aspirations and, somewhere in between, find 'home'.
 

As Gaston Bachelard puts it in The Poetics of Space …'Maybe it is a good thing for us to keep a few dreams of a house that we shall live in later, always later, so much later, in fact, that we shall not have time to achieve it. For a house that was final, one that stood in symmetrical relation to the house we were born in, would lead to thoughts – serious, sad thoughts – and not to dreams. It is better to live in a state of impermanence than in one of finality.'

The experience of her daily rural walks from home to studio feeds her multidisciplinary practice through works that are fragile and transient, creating prints, objects, walks/performances and experiences that solicit discussion. Caroline is interested in the movement of the body and how the movement in time and space affects our perception of a place. She takes her audience on a physical, sensory and emotional journey leaving them with a poetic encounter and a story to tell.

She is trying to capture the essence of what we mean by 'a place', any place. She is interested in the idea of the unity of time, place and action in drama and the scenario she creates around her daily journey addresses these unities. By focussing on the same walk, she explores repetition. In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze said 'The subject of the eternal return is not the same but the different, not the similar but the dissimilar, not the one but the many...'

Her site specific and research-based projects draw on collaborations with local people of many disciplines and expertise as well as specialists in their fields.  She invites communities into the making of her works and likes to blur the role of the audience that often acts as participants.

She is the recipient of several Arts Council England grants and residencies. In 2016 she received the Commendation for Arts in Public Spaces for White Wood from the Saltire Society, Edinburgh. She produced Because it’s empty walk for the The Rural Assembly conference 20- 22 June 2019 commissioned by Whitechapel Gallery, London. Habit{Ing, her latest performance was commission by Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge for the House, October 2019.

She is currently developing two community projects one for Vivacity, Peterborough and one for Bedford Creative Arts 2019/2021. 

She was educated at ESAD Strasbourg, France, was exchange student on the Printmaking Postgraduate course at Edinburgh College of Art, Scotland and received her PGDC from the University of Greenwich. She has taught intensively, people of all ages, in schools, universities, museums and community centre, her artwork feeding in her teaching and vice versa.