Environmental – Teal Caudle
Statement
“Human experience, defined here as the qualiatic, rational, and emotional phenomena that color consciousness, are integral to being. Everything ever perceived by someone has involved some combination of these characteristics, yet our understanding of them is elementary. While science has found the correlation between physical properties and the resulting perceptions they evoke, it has not found why 700 nanometer wavelength light hitting a photoreceptive L-cone results in someone’s experience of red. My work explores these aspects of the human experience beyond words.” —Teal Caudle
As a multimedia artist, Caudle utilizes a visual and sonic language that creates analogs to experience. She wants to understand how physical environments and subjective interpretation influence each other, and how broader movements like culture and spirituality are shaped by a collection of individual experiences. Her hope is to illuminate humanity’s operating system and curate a library of art that is as universal as possible.
Caudle wanted to find materials out in the world that were available to anyone. In practice, she went on walks with a tote bag and collected trash and refuse found along the way—old bottles, tree bark, scraps of fabric, newspapers, and anything that spoke to her. She wanted to ensure that each object was something that any person in Nashville could find without a pay barrier. As a process, she wanted to explore spontaneity and instinct. A compositional framework was never planned to aid the collection process. Relying on intuition to decide in the moment what to take, if or how to refine it, how to display it, and how to connect it to everything else.
The process is a push-and-pull between the artist and the environment. The resulting work portrays the dialogue between self and environment in a way that highlights the ineffable, individual quality of subjective experience.
Bio
Teal Caudle is a mixed media artist originally from Dallas, Texas. Teal discovered a passion for art as a means of self-expression from a young age, and would often involve herself in the creative process as a meditative practice.
Homeschooled until college, Teal pursued a passion for humanitarian work and enrolled in a local community college to learn more about science and eventually work with the Peace Corp. Upon graduating with her associate of science degree in December 2020, Teal took a semester off to hike the Appalachian Trail, a journey that greatly impacted her artistic practice.
After transferring to Vanderbilt University in 2021, Teal discovered a newfound interest in art as a way to engage with the world. Through her first two exhibitions, Activating Space with Light and Sound in 2021 and 2022, Teal found an avenue to explore her intellectual curiosities regarding the nature of experience through video art. This experience inspired her to pursue art more thoroughly.
Teal’s third exhibition, Sunprint Collages in 2022, expanded on these interests and showcased her cyanotype collage that explored the abstracting quality mentalization has on the environment.
