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Carol Anne McChrystal’s sculptures have been exhibited in Los Angeles at Mata Gallery, Orange County Center for Contemporary Art, and Adjunct Positions, and internationally at Galleria Duemila (Manila), Horse & Pony (Berlin) and Stanley Picker Gallery (London). Since earning her MFA from California College of the Arts, McChrystal has participated in numerous residency programs, including Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (US), Sitka Center for Art & Ecology (US), Emerging Islands (PH) and Cill Rialaig (IE). She has received grants from the Puffin Foundation, California Arts Council and Arts Council Ireland. In 2021 she received the Ecosystem X Award from Mozaik Foundation in recognition of artists using contemporary art for social change and in 2024 she was a Puón Institute Fellow at “Ecologies of Flourishing,” a collaborative workshop focused on creative social survival and ecological sustainability in a time of global planetary crisis. McChrystal is based in Los Angeles, California where she is also a community organizer with the Filipino women’s organization GABRIELA.

As part of the collaborative duo Nightmare City (2008-2016), McChrystal created immersive environments that were exhibited at Alter Space in San Francisco, The Luminary in St. Louis, and Horse & Pony in Berlin among others, and showed video works at Essex Flowers in New York, MASS Gallery in Austin, and ACRETV in Chicago. Their work has been written about in publications such as ArtForum and Modern Painters.
Carol Anne McChrystal is a visual artist whose materially-driven works take the form of the traditional plaited mats of her two island homelands, Ireland and the Philippines. Inspired by her own family migration story, her self-taught process of mat-weaving reflects on how traditions necessarily transform in diasporic communities, a result of how migration can separate subsequent generations from the old ways of being with the Land. Influenced by witnessing the role that global industry plays in the dissolution of cultural practices, her meticulously hand-crafted works interweave discarded plastic waste and locally gathered plant materials to meditate on how extractive industry and climate crisis are irrevocably entwined with local experiences of home and shelter. She uses archipelagic thinking, fluidity and relationality, in her art objects to consider the conceptual connections between diaspora, political agency, and deep geologic time. Her engagement with material culture focuses on cultivating the possibility for imagining anti-imperialist global futures—one that’s in step with ancestral knowledge, yet situated in the real material conditions of contemporary life.

CAROL.ANNE.MCCHRYSTAL@GMAIL.COM


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