c vw
Artist, Maker, Workshop facilitator

Born in regional NSW, Carolyn V Watson is a multi-award-winning Brisbane artist.
Highly Commended in the inaugural 2021 Lethbridge Landscape Prize and a dual finalist in the 2020 Tom Bass Prize for Figurative Sculpture, she has won multiple awards at the Brisbane Sculpture Festival (2019, 2018, 2017, 2016) and Brisbane Rotary Art Spectacular (Won – 2016, Finalist – 2017), and been a finalist in numerous awards including the Moreton Bay Regional Art Awards (2019, 2017, 2016, 2013, 2011); the Marie Ellis OAM Drawing Prize (2015, 2013, 2010); the Prometheus Visual Art Award (2011, 2009) and the Lethbridge 10000 Small Scale Art Award (2015), the Jacaranda Acquisitive Drawing Award (2012) and the John Fries Memorial Art Prize (2012). Included in the Churchie National Emerging Art Prize in 2008, her work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions through Australia since 2006.
Carolyn's work is held in public and private collections in Australia and internationally.
REPRESENTED BY
PENNY CONTEMPORARY TAS www.pennycontemporary.com.au
GRAINGER GALLERY ACT WWW.Grainger Gallery | Fine Art
Recent Exhibitions
2022
Cuttings from a homecoming
Side Gallery, Brisbane
2021
Lets play pretend
APA, Gold Coast
Carolyn V Watson's current body of work, cuttings from a homecoming, explores the history of the artist's practice, reconstituting materials and revisiting previously resolved pieces. The result is a fresh, unburdened take on recurrent themes, including extensions of self, personal reflection, the hope of repair and renewal, and the pure delight of chance and studio accidents.
- Laura Brinin 2022
The injunction to 'play pretend,' in the title of Carolyn V Watson's upcoming show with Anthea Polson Art, connotes both childlike innocence and something more ambivalent, even troubling. Across sculptures and panel paintings, Watson stages the shocking vulnerability - and the alienating freshness - of a world made strange to itself through the artist's imaginative intervention into it.
2019
Tall tales and true
APA, Gold Coast
Carolyn V Watson creates elliptical works that elude recognition. Our eyes search for form in fragments, familiarity in the foreign, yet the Brisbane-based artist ensures that we can never quite settle on a single interpretation. Artist Profile spoke to Watson ahead of her newest exhibition 'tall tales and true'.