Carol Pollock is a Muskoka painter whose interest lies in the figure, a discovery she made over many years of life drawing and painting and while completing several fine-arts courses at Nipissing University’s Bracebridge campus.

Many of the works in her ongoing “Lives of Girls and Women” series are based on found photographs that speak of certain eras and the women who defined them, along with the children, especially the girls, who came of age in them. Casual family snapshots act as a springboards for exploring form and idea through paint, the intention being to draw attention to a universality of experience. The figures, whether at ease or in motion, usually dominate the canvas in fields that explore colour and negative space.

“Arcs and Interventions,” Pollock’s first one-person show at Muskoka Arts & Crafts’ Chapel Gallery, was followed in October of 2008 by “The Megumi Cycle.” The series was a meditation on the life of Megumi Yokota, a young Japanese girl taken forcibly from her hometown of Niigata by the North Korean government in an effort to assimilate the cultural habits and languages of captives from neighbouring countries. The works represent a meditation on a girl’s life and on various cultural signifiers that are not consciously apparent but which affect us all.  Compelling in its drama, the young girl’s story also fit in well with the ongoing investigations in “Lives of Girls and Women.”

Carol is currently working in acrylic on canvas or linen.