Since completing her MFA at the Glasgow School of Art in 2010, Kirstin Carlin has almost exclusively worked in single format, creating small-scale, oil paintings of recognisable subject matter – flowers, mountains, sun sets – and translating them into whimsical collections of loose, insouciant brushstrokes in a myriad of colours.
Following her 2020 Flag Project in Tāmaki Makaurau’s Britomart precinct, Carlin has widened her practice by both scaling up and fragmenting the compositions of her paintings. The 20 flags presented in Britomart depicted extreme close-ups of eight of Carlin’s works, blowing up their content beyond recognisability and fully embracing the abstraction that Carlin’s paintings playfully teeter on the edge of.
For Standing in the Sun, Carlin continues to pursue this expanded approach to her practice, for the first time translated into a digital medium. Carlin’s Digital billboard speaks of painting, gesture, exuberance and fun, livening the view of drivers and passers-by.
About Kirstin Carlin
Kirstin Carlin is a Tāmaki Makaurau-based painter. She completed a Master of Fine Arts at Glasgow School of Art in 2010 and has exhibited works nationally and internationally in artist-run spaces, private galleries as well as public art institutions including: Through the Trees, Dunedin Public Art Gallery (2017) and Necessary Distraction: A Painting Show, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki (2015). Carlin is represented by Melanie Roger Gallery in Tāmaki Makaurau. Carlin is currently working on a Creatives in Schools project with a group of students from Mt Roskill Intermediate.