Since graduating in 1998 with an MFA from the Slade, Carol Wyss has won several prizes including the John Ruskin Prize 2012 and the City&Guilds Print Prize. She is a founding member of Geographies of Print, a member of the London Group and exhibits internationally: highlights include the Swiss Church Art Space London, Mayfair Art Weekend, Brantwood Museum Cumbria, the 58th Venice Biennale, Millenium Gallery Museum Sheffield, Johanniterkirche Feldkirch/Austria, Whitechapel Gallery, Barbican Arts Trust, and Kunsthalle Weimar. In 2022 the 1968 Film Group made a documentary about her latest project ‘The Mind has Mountains’.
Wyss’ work is represented in private and public collections among them V&A art collection, TATE Archives, BT Contemporary Art Collection, Clifford Chance Art Collection, Mezzanin Foundation LI, Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein and HILTI Art Foundation.
The Mind has Mountains is an immersive installation made up of large, unframed etchings in triptych formations. These are images of structures from inside of the human skull, evoking a mountainous landscape reminiscent of the Swiss Alps where Wyss grew up. Surrounded by these images the space shifts into a place where consciousness resides – a zone to think and contemplate.
We all exist with the reality of our physical body in this progressively virtual world. There is an unmistakable tangibility in the human skeleton, bones act as a physical reference point in time and space, literally a touchstone. Through the basic structure of the skeleton, Wyss examines our relationship to our surroundings, the temporal human existence and our impact on and synergy with the planet we currently inhabit.
The disconnection with the natural world has led to an ecological crisis. Wyss tries to reconnect us through the bones to our bodies so that they become a physical nudge to our existence, making us acutely aware that we are intrinsically linked to nature.
See how this piece was made here.
The Mind has Mountains, 2021-2022
Etching on paper (installation)
1360mm x 1800mm per triptych
