Paintings by Carolyn Hillyer

Carolyn creates life-size images of archetypal spirit women, ancient mothers and ancestor women infused with mythic symbols and hidden layers of magic: the primordial landscape represented in human form. She has exhibited her work regularly over the last thirty years, usually as large sacred shrine installations that combine the images with her music, original mythological story cycles and totemic handcrafted items. Her paintings form the bones of the many workshop journeys that she creates and teaches on Dartmoor and elsewhere. The images are usually painted as cycles, circles or councils of women. Each cycle may take several years to incubate, then three or four more years to be fully formed upon the board. Fibre and textiles, woven cloth in its many manifestations, are intrinsic to this process. The paintings are available as individual prints or in complete sets. A collection of 52 of her paintings are now published within the Weavers’ Oracle. Select any image to view the images available within each series.

A message from the artist…

I exhibit my paintings very rarely as they are large, often accompanied by bags of drums and bundles of textiles, and generally require a lot of space in which to be installed. So these pages are the best way that I can share this collection with you, each page creating a doorway into the different cycles of my work. For this reason we have made the images high resolution in order to offer you the most crisp and detailed view of them. I thank you in advance for not sharing this work on social media or any other digital platform. I ask you please to not print directly from these pages (unless you are genuinely without resources but desperate to place one of these women on your wall!) With gratitude…