What is the significance of Caroline Christie-Coxon’s Soft Paintings? 

Caroline Christie-Coxon’s Soft Paintings represent a radical evolution in her painting practice, dissolving traditional artistic boundaries and embracing sustainability, movement, and embodied experience. As these paintings transition from the studio into the landscape, the ocean, and onto the artist’s body, they embody an act of merging art, nature, and self into a continuous, living dialogue.

Christie-Coxon’s Soft Paintings abandon the rigid, framed structure of traditional canvases, allowing them to exist fluidly in space, an evolution of form. This shift of liberation from a static object mirrors sustainability in art, moving away from materials that are extractive and permanent toward forms that are adaptable, ephemeral, reusable and responsive to their surroundings.

By stepping beyond the gallery, her paintings reject institutional limitations, reinforcing the idea that art and consciousness must evolve dynamically.

As the paintings move into the landscape and ocean, they merge with elemental forces: wind, water, light becoming part of the ecosystem rather than an imposed object upon it. The painting and/or artist integrate with the natural world. This transition mirrors a growing ecological consciousness in contemporary art, where materials, process, and site are deeply interconnected.

The ocean, a recurring presence in Christie-Coxon’s work, serves as a powerful metaphor for the subconscious, fluidity, and deep time, reinforcing themes of interconnectedness.

As the Soft Paintings become veils or mantles draped over the artist’s body, they enter the realm of performance, ritual, and embodiment relative to the context. In many traditions, the veil or mantle represents transition and revelation, a thin boundary between material and immaterial realms. This transformation links painting to archetypal symbolism, evoking themes of protection, transformation, and identity.

The veil can symbolise mystery, revelation, and initiation, recalling the spiritual or shamanic role of the artist as one who navigates between seen and unseen realms.The veil may be seen as a threshold between worlds. The power of metaphor and archetypes is conveyed through the combination and relationship between the soft painting, the environment and position or manner of the figure. 

By wearing the soft painting, Christie-Coxon becomes part of the work, erasing the distinction between artist, art, and environment.

Historically, the mantle or cloak has been associated with wisdom, transformation, and spiritual authority. The archetypal mantle reflects protection and power. In myth, figures like the Oracle, the Shaman, and the Seer wear veils or mantles to signify their connection to deeper knowledge.

In this context, Christie-Coxon’s act of wearing the painting could symbolise the responsibility of the artist to guide cultural consciousness forward, an act of Conscious Evolution in itself.

Christie-Coxon creates an interaction between the Soft Paintings and the ocean suggesting a dissolution of individual ego into a greater collective consciousness. Water, particularly the ocean, often symbolises intuition, the unknown, and transformational themes central to her exploration of evolving human awareness.

Just as waves shape the shore, this work speaks to how art can shape perception and culture, echoing the way Conscious Evolution occurs through continuous interaction and adaptation.

Christie-Coxon’s intention is that the Soft Paintings are perceived as a manifestation of Conscious Evolution through art. The Soft Paintings represent a living process of art and consciousness evolving together. By shifting from static object to fluid form, integrating with nature, and becoming an extension of the artist’s body, they embody the essence of sustainability, transformation, and deep connection.

Through powerful metaphor and archetypal resonance, these works transcend traditional painting, placing them at the heart of contemporary art’s most urgent dialogues, climate consciousness, decolonial thought, and the reimagining of human-nature relationships. They are not just paintings but living, breathing manifestations of a world in transition and a testament to the artist’s role in shaping that transformation.