Carolyn Parker

Following high school and an early start in the advertising and business worlds, I returned to the arts through night studies at the Art Academy of Cincinnati in the early 1970s, when it was still affiliated with and physically connected to the Cincinnati Art Museum.

After several years of independent study, I earned acceptance into the Art Academy’s full-time program through a highly competitive portfolio review—only twenty or so applicants were admitted each year. Although the Academy offered a diploma rather than a degree at that time, the rigor of its studio culture shaped the foundation of my practice.

This training propelled me into undergraduate work at Wright State University’s School of Fine and Performing Arts, where I concentrated in printmaking and photography. I graduated Bachelor of Fine Arts, magna cum laude, one of my most meaningful early achievements.

Immediately afterward, I pursued postgraduate study at the University of California, Irvine, Claire Trevor School of the Arts, where I earned my Master of Fine Arts. As an incoming student, I received the Regents Fellowship and later served as a Teaching Assistant in Printmaking. It was a turbulent and transformative period personally and culturally—the moment when analog traditions began intersecting with emerging computerized technologies. That tension between heritage and innovation has remained central to my practice ever since.

Speaking Reflection: Inner Authority & Artmaking

At this point in my life, I’ve come to understand that my work—and my self—are made of many parts. The Enneagram and Internal Family Systems help me recognize those voices: the achiever who wants to build, the reformer who longs for clarity, the protector who keeps watch.

When I listen rather than let any single part take over, I feel something deeper: an inner authority, a quiet knowing beneath the noise. This is also how I make art. The process becomes a dialogue—layering, peeling back, editing, revealing—until the work and the self begin to speak the same language.

Material Approach: Where Analog Memory Meets Generative Possibility

Visually, my instincts were shaped in the 1960s—a period of cultural rebellion, graphic experimentation, and a refusal to accept prescribed boundaries. I’ve always been drawn to the tension between inherent beauty and nonconformist reality.

As progressive technologies entered my creative life, they challenged my early beliefs about what it meant to be an “authentic” fine artist. I began in drawing and painting. Photography came next. Digital tools arrived later and, at first, felt like a contradiction.

Today, the chasm between my fine art photography and my generative work is shrinking. I now see these practices not as competing identities, but as parts of the same constellation—each offering its own way of seeing, its own kind of freedom. When new technologies expand the vocabulary of expression, I welcome them into the conversation.

Process: Experimentation, Counterpoint, and Emergence

My creative process moves fluidly between analog and digital methods, guided by curiosity and the desire to understand how form changes shape. I am drawn to experimental ideation, hybrid workflows, and the interplay of intuition with structured systems.

Progressing from analog craft to digital information environments, I have learned to embrace ambiguity, synthesis, and iterative play. Each work becomes a threshold—a place where memory, gesture, technology, and inner authority converge to reveal something previously unseen.

My work explores the shifting architectures of memory, identity, and presence. Through photography, hybrid analog–digital processes, and generative experimentation, I create visual and poetic responses to the ways we inherit, transform, and reimagine our inner worlds. Raised as an identical twin within a family of twins, I learned early how proximity shapes perception. My work now draws from these early structures—not to retell biography, but to understand the thresholds between unity, autonomy, and becoming.

I build imagery through layered metaphors and allegories, contrasting surface reality with emotional undercurrents and latent memory. Rupture and reconstruction often coexist in the same frame. I am drawn to the interplay between destruction and transformation—the moments when form dissolves so something new can emerge. These tensions reflect the psychological terrains we collectively navigate: grief, hope, pattern, residue, and the quiet persistence of renewal.

Across mediums, my practice seeks to retrace memory and examine how meaning shifts at the boundaries of perception. Whether exhibited publicly or shared through digital and social platforms, my work invites viewers into spaces of reflection—rooms where presence, pattern, and identity are continually reconfigured.

My 45+ year corporate career shaped my understanding of systems, communication, and the translation of complexity into clarity. Working across branded marketing, information management, and early digital ecosystems, I helped develop accessible frameworks for organizations navigating large-scale change. My experience spanned B2B and B2C environments and included leadership roles on projects for global companies such as Procter & Gamble, Motorola, General Dynamics, and Lockheed Martin.

In the early 1990s, I championed Total Quality Management principles—structures that emphasized continuous improvement, iterative refinement, and the human impact of workflows. By the mid-2000s, Agile methodologies further transformed how I approached creative problem-solving: breaking ideas into iterative cycles, prioritizing collaboration, and responding fluidly to change rather than adhering rigidly to predetermined plans.

These principles now inform my artistic practice. The same mindset that once guided large organizational systems—iteration, experimentation, responsiveness, clarity—now guides the way I build visual and conceptual work. My hybrid analog–digital process is deeply shaped by this history: the ability to hold complexity, translate it into coherent form, and evolve it through continuous refinement. Design, development, and creative inquiry have become inseparable parts of how I navigate the Thresholds of my ongoing work.