Caro Halford

Artist Caro Halford has created a new set of contemporary collage work. In the past, she has undertaken a sequence of performances.  These include ‘Angelica and I’ in the Spotlights Room at Tate Britain. As well as this, she performed ‘Mary Moser’ at the National Portrait Gallery. These performances were a huge part of the themes that informed this new series of work, mostly addressing overlooked women of the past.

For her new collage work, Caro Halford aims to reconstruct and investigate missing women that were printmakers in history. In particular, she uses the Swiss Neoclassical painter Angelica Kauffman as the subject of her collage ‘Alter Egos of Angelica II’. She constructs each work from an assemblage of photographs and gold leaf, as well as textiles. Each work is half painting and half collage. Importantly, they embody a mysterious ambiguity addressing identity and gender roles.

The ambiguous nature of the work, however stems from Halford’s performance in October 2017 with Angelica Kauffman at the Spotlights room, Tate Britain. As seen in these new works Halford chooses a particular blue-green colour for her backdrops, in this case representing the walls of the Spotlight room at the Tate Britain. All in all, she intends these contemporary collage works to represent the differing alter egos of the artist Angelica Kauffman.

(Photography by Susan Martin)