​Artist Statement​

 

Indi Carlton creates paintings and sculptural works that explore imagination as a vital force for connection, resilience, and renewal. Her practice is rooted in the belief that awe and wonder are not luxuries, but essential forms of nourishment, especially in times of uncertainty and cultural overwhelm. Through her work, she invites viewers to pause, feel, and remember and envision alternative ways of being in relationship with themselves, each other, and the living world.

 

Working primarily in acrylics, Indi builds richly layered surfaces through bold color, texture, and movement. Her intuitive process begins not with a fixed image, but with listening, allowing forms and figures to emerge organically over time. Influenced by artists such as Marc Chagall and other visionary painters who treated imagination as a serious and necessary force, her work balances the sacred and the surreal, the familiar and the otherworldly. Dream logic, symbolic imagery, and the quiet intelligence of nature shape visual worlds that feel both ancient and forward-looking.

 

Recently, Indi’s practice has expanded to include cartonería and sculptural forms, inspired by time spent in Mexico and a deepening interest in animal agency, ancestral memory, and the intelligence of the more-than-human world. These three-dimensional beings extend her painted imagery into physical space, encouraging embodied engagement and reinforcing the idea that art is not only something to observe, but something to experience.

 

Indi does not create art to escape the realities of the world, but to engage them more fully. Her work holds space for grief and hope, complexity and play, offering a quiet yet deliberate resistance to despair. By centering imagination, beauty, and curiosity, her work proposes that new futures are not invented from nothing, but remembered, tended, and brought into being through attention and care.

 

Her paintings and sculptures are meant to awaken rather than decorate, inviting viewers into a more expansive, vibrant, and connected sense of possibility, where imagination becomes a tool for resilience and a doorway into meaningful change.