I Pulled My Shadow Into The Meadow... by Caro Nilsson

Artist's Statement

Shadows greet us whenever the sun is out. Opposites inevitably, inextricably, exist alongside one another, loop-stepping through time. Every boundary between them is a place, a threshold where we meet each other. Here : a place between the sun and the moon, shadow and sunray. Grief and hope, love and heartbreak, fear and trust, endings and beginnings, above and below. We greet all of it. We must. I wonder about the things we think are beautiful in these boundary places (a boundary place, is after all, EVERY place). I wonder about the things we do not think are beautiful in these places. A slow parade of glory and sorrow, as we wander through the big meadow called 'life' together. In the hills not far from here, the late season sunflowers are blooming on the edges of a burn scar that once held a grove of sumac I would visit every fall. In the spring, myrtle spurge covers the hillside – the most beautiful plant whose sap can make a person go blind. Invasive. Must be treated all the way down to the root.

I am talking about bringing everything to the meadow. In order to bring my care I must also bring my fear. In order to bring my hope I must also bring my anger, my grief. All of this under the huge umbrella called love. We and all our beasts belong everywhere, at every threshold : you, me, that doe, that rock, this heartbreak, this hope.

This work explores the tension and harmony of these boundary places, what it feels like to recognize the collision of many feelings. It aims to meet the confusion and cacophony with curiosity. This curiosity is a doorway into deep kinship with the unknowable everything. How much of this unfolding can we make ourselves available to?

Artist's Bio

Caro Nilsson was born in 1993 in Vancouver, Washington and has spent her life in different corners of the United States. She holds a B.A. in Fine Art with a Distinguished Major in Printmaking, and a B.S. in Architecture from the University of Virginia. Caro has shown work in various galleries in Salt Lake City and Charlottesville. In 2025, Caro presented 'For Those Who Bear Witness' at the Northeastern Nevada Museum, which is a body of work about air quality in the Salt Lake Valley and the larger Mountain West. She completed her first solo painting residency in Connecticut in 2021, and was hosted as an artist-in-residence at the Taft Nicholson Center in Montana summer of 2024. Caro currently lives as a multi-media painter and muralist, painting full time from Salt Lake City.

Rooted in traditions of impressionism, Caro's paintings are poems about the land. They explore the idea that opposites are often holding hands (grief+hope, stillness+movement, anger+joy), and landscapes are a stage on which these relationships unfold. Her work understands that the act of observation (beyond just that of sight) is like casting a spell, it has the ability to shift everything around us. Painted primarily through memory, the facts of the place blur and become less imp