Benson Campus Galleries

Continuing with the spring Benson Galleries exhibition theme of current landscapes is HOME by Caren Stansell, mixed media artist and new full-time Visual Arts instructor at Greenville Technical College. HOME is Caren’s personal expansion of the definitions of home from her childhood dwelling place at the base of the Blue Ridge Mountains in South Carolina to its surrounding woods and waterways.
 
Though Caren herself has not moved away, she has watched her home landscape move on or maybe devolve. She discusses the waste and trash generated by our consumer culture as a form of destruction of this landscape. Both are polluting our local home here in the Upstate. She states, “I am interested in what we choose to leave behind and how we connect our identity to these places.” Her subjects are crumbling buildings and informal trash heaps presented through fascinating kaleidoscopic images that seem to continue infinitely like the concentric ripples in water begun with a drop. Beside pushing the definition of home, she also dissolves the boundaries of printmaking, photography, and sculpture.
 
Before joining the full-time faculty at GTC, Caren taught design, drawing, photography, printmaking, and ceramics studio classes, as well as art history at GTC and Lander University. She is a Greenville Tech alum and Converse College graduate, and she received her MFA in Printmaking from Clemson University. Her work has been shown throughout the Southeast in exhibitions such as the Atlanta Print Biennial and included in publications like CREATIVE QUARTERLY #44. Her work has also been in international exhibitions such as Confluence, an International Print Exchange, a traveling group show in Taiwan. Caren states in her bio that “Her ambition is to share her art with as many individuals as possible.”