Carol Bajen-Gahm: Grounded in the Littoral

Christina Parker Gallery is pleased to announce Grounded in the Littoral, an exhibition of new mixed media works by Carol Bajen-Gahm. The exhibition will open with an artist reception on Friday, Apr. 19 from 6–8pm, and will continue until May 11. Music at the opening reception will be provided by Boyd Chubbs.

Carol Bajen-Gahm will also be giving an artist talk and tour in the gallery on Saturday, Apr. 27 from 3–4pm.

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This week I dipped a clump of grass in some red ochre silt I found alongside the path and threw it on an unstretched canvas; last week I took a piece of muslin out of the composter. Sometimes Asian paper or canvas sits outside for weeks with rusty metal and plant roots leaving natural patterns sometimes investigated by ants and worms. I am grounding my work using silt, sand, dirt clods, soaked grasses, seaweed, rusty metal, buried material and ashes.

I had become trapped by painting on boards, but a new approach using unstretched canvas has given me a great freedom to experiment. I have broadened the range of the processes I use to begin my work. Although I still use oil, cold wax, and printed images, my palette has expanded to include inks, acrylic mediums, graphite, and pigmented encaustic gesso.

Nature inspires me as I work with its raw power and fierce beauty to create an environment for my work. The constant changes of light and weather that engulf me in my shoreside studio have always been a part of my paintings, but now I am inviting nature to physically join in the dance, using materials not necessarily considered beautiful to make layers that end up as interesting textures, to create an atmosphere that comes together and breathes together.

The musician John Cage would use readings from the I Ching to determine what notes he would use in a composition to “let the sounds be themselves”. That same sense of chance plays a large part in my practice.

April 2024

I am working with atmospheric settings that create an environment for my paintings.

Carol Bajen-Gahm is an artist from Massachusetts who first came to Newfoundland in 2002 for a painting residency at Pouch Cove. Affected by the light, landscape, and people of Newfoundland, she and her husband bought a house and studio on the ocean in Torbay, just outside the capital city of St. John’s.

Between 2003 and 2006 she attended residencies in Costa Rica, Dorland Mountain in California and the Robert P. MacNamara Residency in Westport Island, Maine. In 2006 she received a Joan Mitchell grant to attend a residency at the Santa Fe Institute of Art. She went back to Costa Rica in January of 2016, and that fall she attended the Two Rooms Residency at Duntara, an outport community on the Bonavista peninsula of Newfoundland.

In 2009, R&F Paints of Kingston, NY, equipped Carol’s studio to teach encaustic painting. Carol then became an R&F at-large instructor, presenting encaustic workshops at her Torbay Bight Studio.

Carol has a multidisciplinary master’s degree from UMass Amherst from both the music and art departments. She now concentrates on her abstract oil and mixed media works which explore the effects of nature, place and time on the inner and outer landscape. She likes to investigate dark spaces, tangled areas, time shifts and spatial juxtapositions in her work. She believes it is crucial to be alive to the senses. “My aim is to create a kind of beauty with a shadow; one that has been informed by darkness; beauty that is abstract, spiritual, meditative and eventually, healing.”

Her paintings have been exhibited in Newfoundland and at Art Toronto, represented by Christina Parker Gallery. She is also represented by the Sivarulrasa Gallery in Almonte, Ontario. Her works have been exhibited in Austria, and in the United States in New York City, Kingston NY, Boston, and western Massachusetts.

Carol Bajen-Gahm’s CV

Carol Bajen-Gahm Brochure