Dionis Carter is an illustrator, textile designer, and photographer. She graduated from the Savannah College of Art and Design in 2016 with a BFA in Fibers and uses traditional and non-traditional drawing, fiber, and sculptural processes. Her designs, though informed by history and tradition, are inspired by nature and issues in contemporary society, such as environmentalism, empathy, apathy, and human identity. Raised in both the woodlands of Sherborn and on the shores of Nantucket Island, she grew up infatuated with the natural world. She has a fascination for the patterns she sees in nature and society, and she hopes to incorporate travel into her work as a way to experience nature, history, and art around the world.
I’ve always been a maker—drawing, painting, sculpting, photographing with whatever materials were around me; pencils, napkins, sand, even babybel cheese wax—yet there came a period of time when I thought that “creative” was an adjective reserved only for people who could think up entirely new worlds. However, I’ve come to realize all creators are grounded to reality in their own ways; that creation is about transmuting your experience, taking a few of the infinite perceptions of your lived experience and putting them back together in a way that’s either unrecognizable or as exact an homage to the original as you can manage. My creativity exists at an endless number of crossroads, and the more I see, the more ways I learn how to create, the more that I can say. I want to be able to raise questions, spark awareness, and encourage empathy, curiosity, and joy; to relate people to one another in unexpected ways; to create dialogue within and across society; to strike the creativity that resides in others.
Photography has always allowed me a freedom and ease of expression that other creative means never have. To be able to distill a moment with such inarguable honesty and authenticity in a spontaneous instant is an absolute gift to a perfectionist and over thinker. Photography has given me the gift of a practice of experiential gratitude, archiving my life and shaping my memory.
