〈A Lower Deep〉
Patrick Carroll’s solo exhibition A Lower Deep begins as a story of descent, but its end is not destruction — it is reconstruction. The title comes from Paradise Lost by John Milton: “And in the lowest deep a lower deep still threatening to devour me.” Another abyss opens beneath the deepest ground. For Carroll, the phrase is not a monologue of despair but a sensation of ongoing life — of watching the world grow more brutal, of realizing the stage you came of age upon no longer holds. Even so, he seeks not resistance but a way to endure — a queer inheritance that teaches how not to be entirely destroyed by the fall. Working with an old domestic knitting machine, Carroll weaves thread into language. Within the repeated gestures of his hands, words tighten into structure and color condenses into feeling. Letters drift across the knitted surface; meaning seeps through the gaps. He chooses looseness over completion — a state where humor, pity, survival, and honor coexist. In A Lower Deep, collapse is not an ending but a condition. From the ruins of what was once solid, he asks: what remains? The surfaces shimmer, are embedded, and veiled. They speak less in declarations than in aftertones. Each panel breathes like a line of a poem, thread vibrating with the pulse of the world being rewoven. Between the legible and the vanished, the exhibition trembles. A Lower Deep offers no promise of salvation — only a place to linger, where language breaks, and light begins.
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Patrick Carroll (b. 1990, Menlo Park, CA)
Lives & works in Los Angeles, USA.
Patrick Carroll is an artist who treats language as material. Working with knitting machines, he leaves traces of words, phrases, and emotional residue on the surface of his works. Rather than tightly constructing the textile, he allows space — gaps where air passes through — making the imperfection of language physically visible. Letters hover on the knitted surface; meaning dissipates just before becoming readable. What interests him is not the completed declaration, but the vibration that occurs in between. Carroll studied Comparative Literature at Princeton University and Creative Writing at UC Riverside before shifting into textile as a material language. He knits yarn into language, letting writing and knitting function through the same structural logic: repetition, looseness, and the breath left between sentences. This movement between mediums dissolves boundaries between painting, sculpture, and textile, allowing language to be experienced visually and tactilely. His works explore the desire for legibility — and its refusal, using text not as a tool for clarity but as a structure for feeling. Language sometimes becomes too clear and must blur; sometimes too dense and must dissolve. In this instability, Carroll locates humor, irreversibility, tenderness, and a queer mode of endurance — a way to keep living without being destroyed. Carroll continues to build exhibitions across the intersections of art, fashion, and literature. Recent works incorporate yarn remnants from fashion houses, reassigning leftover materials into new meaning. He is committed to examining what remains after language fragments: the memory held by the body, the emotional residue of text, and the question of how one learns to endure — again and again.
