Often uneasy or tragic, irrational or other, my work is linked to death and rebirth: making sculpture from organic materials as a means of advocacy, atonement or commemoration for animal life; shifting to sound, film, ritual and story to enter emotional and numinous spaces of magic, memory and dream. What appears on the surface to be a wilful disturbance of the remains of organic life in order to fulfil a creative compulsion is intended to be part of a transforming and re-sanctifying process. Taken materials such as earth and fur are reconfigured to express complex feelings of grief and loss, love and communion, fertility and renewal; rock, tooth, branch and bone become ritual tools to drum, scratch and mark each work, inviting the resident spirit. Often, sculpture is returned to the land through ritual practice, the original materials transfigured by earth, fire and water into new forms and meaning. These acts of destruction, though informed by a powerful sense of fragility and futility, are upheld by my conviction in an irrepressible spirit for regeneration in the world: an imperishable flame that rises most clearly for me in landscape and the magic and otherness of animals.

Born in Worcestershire, Jim Carter received an MA with distinction in Art and Environment from Falmouth University and an MSc award in Ecopsychology from the Centre for Human Ecology in Edinburgh. His work has been published in Dark Mountain, Earthlines and Unpsychology Magazine.

Contact: jnacarter@gmail.com

Scraps from the Crow Cult (Anima Mundi Gallery, St Ives, 2023)
Mystes (Walcot Chapel, Bath, 2022)
Of Black Shires (The Sidney Nolan Trust, Presteigne, 2022)
Rum Lad (Granary Gallery, Dartington College of Arts, 2021)
Bone Skin Spirit (Anima Mundi Gallery, St Ives, 2020)
The Hail Glow (Anima Mundi Gallery, St Ives, 2018)

Summa (Anima Mundi Gallery, St Ives, 2024)
Wheel of the Year (Anima Mundi Gallery, St Ives, 2023)
Protected by Alarms (Vicarage Flats, St Ives, 2019)
The Garden (Tremenheere Sculpture Gardens, Penzance, 2019)
Vulgar Earth (Theatr Brycheiniog, Brecon, 2018)
Tributary Idols (Garden Room Gallery, Dartington, 2017)
Amen and Omen (The Poly, Falmouth, 2015)
Soil Culture (Falmouth University, 2014)
The Tribe Prize (Edgar Modern, Bath, 2014)
Earth Artists (Oriel Gallery, Hay-on-Wye, 2011)

We burnt our hands in summer fires to change the future, 2023
Of Black Shires, 2022
The Heathen Pool, 2021
The Animal X, 2018
Deer of the Burning Ghost, 2017
Shrine of Lit Deity, 2017

First among green tongues, 2023
The Rays, 2022
Of Black Shires, 2022
Rapture, 2021
The feathers of which shine at night like silver, 2021
Hawthrum, 2019
The Crow Gyre, 2018
Field Beatitudes, 2016
English Object, 2014

Dark Mountain Issue 25, 2024
Mystes, 2022
Dark Mountain Issue 20, Abyss, 2021
Dark Mountain Issue 19, Requiem, 2021
The Hail Glow, 2017
The Haruspex, 2017