Carol Mavor

“Hot Salt Medusa,” Esther Teichmann, Carol Mavor, Chantal Faust, 14 March – 11 April, 2015

She is a kissing cousin of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Susan Stewart, in her attention to touch and affect, in her sensitivity to her own emotions and sense perceptions in her apprehension of art. So, for an art historian in particular, her work is singular, unusually labile, sensuous, associative, and almost disturbingly intense.
Emma Wilson ( on Mavor’s writing), Critical Quarterly

As a student, Carol Mavor started out making art objects, not writing about them. To steal the words of the French historian Jules Michelet, you might say that she is an ‘artist historian’. Before embarking on her PhD in the History of Consciousness, at the University of California, Santa Cruz (under the direction of Helene Moglen and Hayden White), Mavor received an MFA from the University of California, San Diego. At UCSD, Mavor studied painting and film with the critic-painter Manny Farber. She learned about colour and utopia from Patricia Patterson. She saw beyond ‘objecthood’ under the tutelage of performance greats like Allan Kaprow and Eleanor Antin. Inspired by her teachers, who were often writers and makers, Mavor made her own artworks and wrote scripts. Performing within her sculpted, painted, carved, wallpapered, furnished scenes, she told stories of childhoods, real and imaginary. One performance was entitled Alice Malice and was the seed of Mavor’s lifelong interest in Lewis Carroll. Thereafter, writing and art-making was forever knitted for Mavor.