www.carolmilne.com
@carolmilneart

Carol Milne was born in Canada and spent her first 18 years at 18 different addresses in Canada, the US, and Germany. She received a degree in Landscape Architecture from the University of Guelph, Canada, but realized in her senior year that she was more interested in sculpture than landscape. Her senior thesis, “Landscape as Art/Art as Landscape,” drew her into the realm of sculpture, and the die was cast. She attended two years of graduate school in sculpture at the University of Iowa, where she learned about metal casting and experimented with glass. She has been working as a sculptor ever since.
In 2000 Carol took her first glass class at Pratt Fine Arts Center in Seattle. She began kiln casting in 2002, and in 2006 became the lone pioneer in the field of knitted glass. Pushing the limits of glass through persistent and relentless experimentation, she developed a variation of the lost wax casting process to cast knitted work in glass. She now travels worldwide to teach workshops. Her art has taken her to such far-flung places as Istanbul, New Zealand, and Tasmania, but she also teaches extensively in the US.

“Art is a form of communication. I very much want my work to resonate with an audience, but it's ridiculous to think I can control how you see my work or that you care what inspires and motivates me. I certainly share if asked. But we all respond to art on an emotional level from our personal experiences. If you experience beauty, awe, or joy, that's enough. I don't need to convert you to my way of seeing the world.”

“The art world has a prejudice against women's work. It’s changing, but still there. Misogyny, affordability of materials, and status, perhaps? I have certainly felt the cold shoulder of disapproval. My work is unabashedly feminine, "crafty," and colorful, which in the art world means not art. The twist is that I knit crafty things in glass, transforming soft to hard, functional to dysfunctional, and flexible to fragile. I'm pushing the art world to get over itself and question its prejudices. ”

“Is it craft or art? The question is an elitist filter to separate out work in materials linked to functional items: clay, fiber, glass, and the like. Art, the thinking goes, must be intellectual and non-functional. Yawn. I don't care what you call it. I am interested in work that doesn't just follow a recipe or use a cookie-cutter template. Art is improvisational. Art takes risks, experiments, surprises, and builds on what has come before it. And believe it or not, sometimes artwork is functional.”

“I like to create knitted works-in-progress with knitting needles in place and put them on a pedestal. The idea makes me laugh.  A seemingly unfinished work displayed on a pedestal — Why would you do that?  It's my way of thumbing my nose at the idea that the final product is important. These works are a celebration of the act of creating. I'm always more interested in the creative process than in the finished piece.”