Carrie E Neal
PhD Candidate 2020-23
Carrie E Neal is an integral thinker. Liking the challenge of making connections between diverse fields of study and look for ways to connect the ethereal with the practical, Carrie find ways to bring design thinking, consciousness evolution, facilitation, social justice, and holistic healing to each project. As an artist and maker, the work spans multiple disciplines including video, multimedia theater projects, book making, and quilting.
Carrie has a Master of Arts in Teaching from Manhattanville College, and a Master of Arts in Media Studies from The New School. Carrie completed coursework for a Master of Arts program in Consciousness Studies and Transpersonal Psychology at The Graduate Institute with a research focus on collective intersubjectivity and expects to complete a Master of Science in Organizational Change Management with a certificate in Leadership and Change shortly.
Research includes leader development higher education, collective intersubjectivity and capacity building for anti-oppression pedagogy, and now intersubjective objects.
praxis statement
My creative practice and interests are varied and diverse. Mostly, I make work in private - a reflection of my inner perceptions and the ordering of histories and thoughts. Sometimes I work collaboratively, from within a team or inside a larger process as a way of empowering others. Not engaging in the Spectacle has been a part of my practice for as long as I can remember and has defaulted into praxis. I remember thinking about artifacts and everyday life as a form or self-portraiture, visually documenting myself through the ways in which I “showed up” and performed myself. In my work I have told the stories of others and captured observations, allowing my voice to be represented in the effects of choice-making. My voice was represented in the form and structures of books or facilitation strategies I used in collaborative practice. Other times it was in the solitary action of fabric selection, pattern design, and repetition of a sewing needle and thread in a machine. In each of these cases there is something that is formed from what is unseen - unseen and yet observed.
research interest
I often think about the intersection of consciousness, the development of human thought, art, design and everyday creativity. In my practice as an educator I am exploring, developing, and implementing multidisciplinary creative pedagogic practice by drawing on design theory, philosophy, cultural studies, social science, and natural science.
My current work is both a collaborative practice and private in process, highlighting my values as a creative and maker. I am working on projects that clothe, surround, represent, and hold memories and reflection in textile. More than a contemporary heirloom, each piece will be a representation of the stories and memories of the people who will use the final products. Through interviews and reflective practice, a series of participants will share their thoughts, dreams, inspirations, and hopes. These will be interpreted and encapsulated into wearable and usable objects - artifacts, symbols, and items of myth, reflecting back their inspiration to their thought-founders (the participants). This project (literally) weaves together my interest in reflective practice, objects and artifacts, hidden identities, and sub-threshold consciousness, stories, form, and the voice of the artist in choice-making - showing both the essence behind the form and new forms themselves.