BECOMING
The World of Carole Faye
Transformation is the defining force of Carole Faye’s artistic practice. Working across mixed media and sculpture, she reclaims discarded materials and overlooked objects, revealing that what is broken, forgotten, or cast aside is never without value. Through acts of collecting, assembling, and reinvention, Faye creates works that explore personal evolution, memory, resilience, and our enduring connection to place.
Born in Miami and raised in New York, Faye’s fascination with found materials began in childhood while accompanying her father to Manhattan’s garment district. There she discovered beauty in discarded buttons, lace, trim, and fabric remnants – objects whose histories inspired new possibilities. That instinct to gather and transform continued throughout nearly a decade living in Shanghai, where colorful discarded business cards became richly layered portraits of commuters, neighborhoods, and the rhythms of everyday life. Today, in Key West, Faye scavenges vintage Florida Keys marketing materials, estate sale discoveries, roadside artifacts, and fragments of island life, weaving them into paintings and sculptures that celebrate nostalgia, community, and the delicate relationship between people and the environment.
For Faye, every reclaimed fragment carries a story. Removed from its original purpose, each object is given the opportunity to become something entirely new. In many ways, these materials mirror the human experience. As we move through life, we are continually shaped by the places we inhabit, the people we encounter, and the challenges we overcome. Identity is not fixed but assembled over time, layer by layer, from memory, loss, joy, and transformation.
As Faye reflects, ‘We are architects and archaeologists of our own story, borrowing and referencing encounters with that which is known, repurposed, broken, discarded pieces of history and making it new again.’ Her work invites us to see ourselves in these transformed materials and to consider how our own histories continue to shape who we are becoming.
BECOMING: The World of Carole Faye brings together paintings and sculptures spanning the artist’s evolving practice while illuminating the common thread that unites them: the belief that transformation is both an artistic act and a profoundly human one. Like the reclaimed fragments from which they are made, these works remind us that beauty is not found in perfection but in the capacity to adapt, endure, and continually become.
