Artist Caroline McQuarrie works with photography, video and domestic craft to explore meaning carried in photographic and craft-based objects and domestic, suburban or community sites. Her work explores the role of the feminine in everyday life and investigates the capacity for the act of making to create agency in women’s lives. She has worked on various projects exploring how stories from out of the way places can resonate with the wider world.

In this work Homewardbounder, a term given to goldminers who strike it big enough to head home, we are shown the remnant of an adit, an entrance to an exploratory mining shaft. The Homewardbounder series was photographed on the West Coast where McQuarrie was raised and where a goldmining boom in the mid-1800s brought thousands of miners from around the world to a lush and sparsely populated coast. In this work we observe a destructive act of hope slowly becoming decolonised by the native bush. As we gaze into its depths, we are left to imagine the untold story and complex history of this area.

McQuarrie received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Canterbury University in 1997 and Master of Fine Arts from Massey University, Wellington in 2005. She teaches photography and supervises Master of Fine Arts candidates at Massey University.