01 Apr Embroidered with Desire: The Unruly Art of Carole Caroompas
By Tyler Stallings
For decades, Carole Caroompas relentlessly pursued a vision that fused punk aesthetics, feminist critique, and literary excavation. With her passing in 2022, the full extent of her artistic reach is only beginning to be reckoned with. Heathcliff and the Femme Fatale Go on Tour, now on view at Laguna Art Museum, is the first focused institutional exhibition of this late-career body of work, and it arrives with the quiet force of a long-overdue acknowledgment. Guest curated by Rochelle Steiner, the show pulls viewers into a dense web of references, from embroidered kitchen towels to sex ads clipped from the LA Weekly, all marshaled in the service of exploring gender, power, and desire.
The ten-part series, made between 1997 and 2001, finds Caroompas at a high point of formal invention and conceptual layering. Using Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights as a narrative scaffold, she built a personalized mythology of creative outsiders. Heathcliff becomes a procession of rock icons—Jimi Hendrix, Joe Strummer, Nick Cave—while the artist casts herself in the fluid role of the femme fatale. These couplings unfold across embroidered textiles, appropriated imagery, and vividly painted surfaces, forming hybrid altarpieces to transgressive love and unruly gender performances.
Caroompas’s process was exhaustive and deliberate. She annotated passages of Brontë’s novel, extracted lines as titles, and drafted full-scale line drawings before transferring them onto canvas or cloth. In A Cuckoo’s History (1998–99), Hendrix presides over a field of bird’s nests, golden eggs, and purple-tinted women borrowed from the banned U.K. cover of Electric Ladyland. The image pulses with ambivalence—fertility and barrenness co-exist, attraction and aggression blur. Caroompas described her aim as “to archive a man that was capable of a partnership relationship.”
These paintings often function as tattooed surfaces—layered skins inscribed with cultural memory, personal desire, and feminist critique. The found textiles recall vintage linens but become the dermis on which histories are rewritten. The rock icons appear as stark imprints, branded into the works like icons on flesh. The artist’s handwritten phrases further mark these surfaces, drawing parallels to tattooing as both declaration and vulnerability. Viewers, too, are marked by the work; we carry it with us in fragments, psychic tattoos etched in the mind.
These paintings emerged from a unique confluence of artistic movements. Caroompas’s early practice intersected with the Pattern and Decoration movement and feminist performance in Los Angeles during the late 1970s and early ’80s. She made works that stitched over found textiles, embedding traditional “women’s work” with imagery culled from pornography, advertising, music, and literature. She embraced the sensibilities of punk and glam while resisting reductive gender binaries. Her art was theatrical, argumentative, and unapologetically messy.
The Heathcliff series channels this synthesis with startling clarity. In Queen of the Countryside (1997), Caroompas constructs a punk-inflected pageant of gendered archetypes and cultural dissonance. John Doe and Exene Cervenka of the L.A. punk band X appear alongside Joe Strummer of The Clash and a spectral Catherine Earnshaw, the headstrong, conflicted heroine of Wuthering Heights whose passionate but doomed relationship with Heathcliff haunts Brontë’s novel. Caroompas positions these figures around a tea party scene drawn from Alice in Wonderland, collapsing literary fantasy into rock mythology. The backdrop is flush with nude beauty pageant winners, vintage pin-ups, and a riot of floral patterns stitched and painted across the canvas. The result is not only a collision of eras and media, but a layered inquiry into power, spectacle, and female self-fashioning—both critiquing and reveling in the seductions of rock culture and romantic obsession.
Cliff Benjamin, former co-owner of Western Project and longtime champion of Caroompas’s work, now oversees her estate and was instrumental in placing two of her paintings in Laguna Art Museum’s permanent collection. With this renewed attention, one hopes more institutions will soon follow. His ongoing efforts to preserve and share this body of work have culminated in this exhibition, which allows the viewer to focus on a single series, rather than a retrospective sweep. It’s a smart curatorial choice. These paintings demand sustained attention; they resist casual scanning and reward close reading. Each is an ecosystem of visual and textual cues: a footnote-laden mixtape of feminist art history, gothic romance, and Southern California counterculture.
Rochelle Steiner, in her accompanying essay, describes Caroompas’s practice as a “lively mashup of ideas and imagery, both sought and found,” noting how it stemmed from her earliest passions—archaeology, poetry, and painting—into an approach that “revealed her feminist perspective.” She was especially adept at turning her references into ambivalent symbols. A found embroidery might cradle a sex ad; a dreamy literary quote might be punctured by aggressive brushwork. These contradictions were not reconciled, but rather held in productive tension.
Caroompas’s work never found the commercial or institutional embrace accorded to many of her male peers, or even to a select few women artists who became figureheads of feminism in the arts. Part of this stems from her own refusal to conform to expectations. Her work was too sexual to be polite, too punk to be fully canonized within P&D, and too literary to ride the wave of the abject body artists in 1990s L.A. And yet, her circle included Roy Dowell, Tom Knechtel, and Lari Pittman. She belonged to a generation of artists navigating the art scene in a post-conceptual, post-studio era Los Angeles where narrative, painting, and identity politics collided.
Comparable contemporaries include artists such as Kathe Burkhardt in New York, whose irreverent portrayals of female figures—often through her Liz Taylor series—combine pop culture, feminist critique, and textual overlays in a way that echoes Caroompas’s own mashups of literature, music, and myth. In Los Angeles, Lari Pittman similarly fused decorative excess with social commentary, exploring themes of gender, queer desire, and narrative construction. While Burkhardt challenged dominant portrayals of women, Pittman layered his compositions with allusions to gay male culture, reframing identity and sexuality through symbolic and visually intricate storytelling. Like Caroompas, both artists inserted unruly, transgressive figures into densely packed compositions, unsettling cultural scripts around power, sexuality, and representation. Though Caroompas never received the same level of institutional recognition, her work belongs firmly within this lineage of feminist and queer image-makers reshaping how personal and political identities are pictured.
In Blue Impressions Are Left on Her Colorless Skin (2001), Caroompas positions Heathcliff as Nick Cave, flanked by eight women rendered in blue, drawn from local sex ads. Their bruised hues recall the passage in Wuthering Heights from which the title is drawn. Overlaid are embroidered Oaxaca kitchen towels declaring “Tuyo es Corazon”—a domestic whisper of ownership. It’s here that Caroompas’s critique sharpens. Domesticity, romance, and commodification converge into a deeply uncomfortable truth about gendered violence.
By the time Caroompas completed this series, she had honed a distinctive mode of painting that was conceptual, narrative, and full of unresolved desire. She deserves to be understood not only in the context of feminist art history but as an artist whose work anticipated current discussions around gender fluidity, performance, and appropriation. In this regard, Heathcliff and the Femme Fatale Go on Tour feels not only of its time but ahead of it.
Carole Caroompas’s legacy is in strong hands. With Cliff Benjamin’s guidance and Rochelle Steiner’s curatorial rigor, this exhibition presents a powerful case for her inclusion in the larger story of contemporary art. For now, the paintings at Laguna Art Museum offer not only a look back, but an invitation forward.
Carole Caroompas: Heathcliff and the Femme Fatale Go on Tour
March 30-July 13, 2025
307 Cliff Drive
Laguna Beach, CA 92651
Tyler Stallings is a writer, filmmaker, artist, and curator based in Southern California. With over 30 years of experience, he has contributed to and edited numerous books and catalogs, offering insightful scholarship in contemporary art. To learn more about his work, visit www.tylerstallings.com.
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