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Caroline Creeden is a fiber and ceramic artist from Maryland. She has a BFA in Fibers and a MA in Teaching from the Maryland Institute College of Art. Caroline teaches photography and art in the Baltimore area. Most recently, she was awarded the John D. Rockefeller Library research fellowship to study the role of oyster shells in Colonial American life. Previously, she was awarded the France-Merrick Fellowship to run an environmental arts program in a Baltimore City school. She is deeply influenced by the natural world and her family's history. An avid researcher, Caroline is often found visiting historical sites, analyzing historical documents, and volunteering at a farm on a living history museum in order to develop new concepts and forms for future work.

Her current bodies of work revolve around the historical building material called tabby, a form of concrete used in the southern United States between the 17th and 19th centuries created from mixing oyster shells, homemade lime (produced from firing oyster shells in a rick), sand, and water. Other works revolve around historical narratives and the meaning of clothing and cloth in ordinary peoples' lives.

Statement 

As a child, I played in front of ancestral portraits in my grandparents’ living room. I was surrounded by the memories and stories of those people who watched me as I lay on the carpet playing with building blocks and figurines. Those early memories and experiences focusing on ancestry and history created a passion for storytelling and preservation. Working in traditional craft materials, fiber and ceramics, allow me to explore ideas of the maker, the user, and the story the objects tells.

I consider ways of preserving objects and memories through fiber techniques, which hold memories of the maker and the user. Clothing retains the memory of a person: their blood, sweat, tears, scent, and the form of their body long after the individual has left it behind. It also retains our connections to people, our genealogy, our history, and our loved ones. 

While working with clay, I create forms that mimic historical architecture or processes. Using an oyster shell as my tool, I carve away at clay sculptures or domestic objects to represent tabby, a historical form of concrete made with oyster shells in the 17th century. I consider how the tabby decays over time to reveal the oyster shells hidden within its white walls, like how history and memory fade over time.