Under a White Sky / The Nature of the Future

Caroline Hatfield

As an artist, I am interested in using the tools, tropes, and cognitive frameworks of science fiction to challenge our relationship to our environment. My recent work embodies our collective understanding of landscape as a medium and nature as commodity, a broadening scope of extraction and intervention, and imminent changes in the world around us. These image-based works, sourced from sites of artificial waterways and nature tourism, combine elemental and geological forms into estranged landscapes. By creating an alternative or fictional ground to consider, human hierarchies of presence and absence, potential and waste, and mediations and boundaries can soften and reconfigure.

Caroline Hatfield’s creative practice utilizes sculpture, installation, and extended media to explore themes of landscape and science fiction. After completing a Sculpture BFA at The University of Tennessee, she earned an MFA in Interdisciplinary Studio Art from Towson University. Hatfield has been included in numerous publications and has exhibited artwork nationally and internationally at venues such as the Mint Museum in Charlotte, NC; the Delaware Contemporary in Wilmington, DE; and the CICA Museum in Gimpo, South Korea. Recent solo exhibitions include "Land and Water" at 500 X Gallery in Dallas, TX, and “Impart” at Lincoln Memorial University in Cumberland Gap, TN. Among her awards and honors, she is a recipient of the Trawick Contemporary Art Prize and a South Arts Cross-Sector Impact Grant. She is based in Mississippi, where she works as Assistant Professor and Area Coordinator of Sculpture at Mississippi State University.