Caroline Hanson

Caroline Hanson is a relief printmaker and multidisciplinary artist based in the Appalachian region along the West Virginia–Virginia border. She holds a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Working primarily in hand-carved linoleum, she creates psychologically driven images rooted in lucid dreaming, symbolic systems, and mythic perception. Her work explores introspection, labor, and altered states, using figures, animals, and cosmic landscapes as visual languages of the unconscious.

Hanson is the founder of State Line Press and maintains an active studio practice alongside community-based projects and public art initiatives. Her work bridges fine art and public engagement, treating printmaking as both a contemplative and accessible medium. She works from a 200-year-old barn studio in rural Appalachia.

Caroline Hanson - State Line Press - Artist Statement

My practice centers on relief prints that function as psychological spaces. Working primarily in hand-carved linoleum, I create images intended to be entered rather than decoded. Figures emerge, environments shift, symbols return. Meaning emerges slowly, arising from atmosphere, repetition, and relationship, not through fixed narrative.

The imagery grows from lucid dreaming and depth psychology—moments when the boundary between inner and outer experience becomes uncertain. I am interested in perception as something active: memory that alters space, emotion that reshapes form, internal realities that feel as structured and convincing as physical ones. My work never describes these experiences directly. I construct alternate worlds governed by their own visual logic, worlds that allow viewers to enter, to construct their own meanings.

Dreams offer one model for this way of seeing. They compress time, distort scale, collapse places together, and allow contradictory truths to exist at once. My prints borrow from that structure. Figures, animals, architecture, weather, and recurring objects appear to serve as carriers of emotional and symbolic weight.

Influenced by Jungian ideas surrounding the unconscious and archetypal imagery, I use symbols as living forms, not fixed codes. Symbols may originate in personal systems of meaning, but they remain intentionally open, their meaning shifting through context. Repeated forms recur like motifs from a music score, both recognizable and subtly different each time they appear. Light, gravity, circular forms, thresholds, and openings recur throughout the work, sometimes suggesting psychic pressure or introspection, other times hinting at expansion, rupture, or release. I am drawn to the moment ordinary space becomes strange enough to reveal itself differently, when awareness turns inward and the mind begins observing itself. In such moments, recognition matters more than interpretation.

That experience feels inseparable from relief printmaking. Carving is slow, physical, and irreversible. Material is removed rather than added. Each mark records time and commitment while slowly constructing something immaterial. The process mirrors the way dreams accumulate meaning through return, distortion, and repetition.

These prints are not intended to illustrate a story. They create conditions in which stories can emerge by inviting viewers into spaces that remain open long enough for personal histories, symbolic associations, and internal perceptions to blossom into meaning. 

What emerges belongs partly to me and partly to the viewer.