About Carolyn

  • Who am I?

    It is a tricky question as I am writing the answer myself.

    I am abstract, yet made of absolutes. I am mercurial yet extremely loyal. I am highly creative and a good entrepreneur. So perhaps complex could be a good word.

    I am able to do a lot of different things, yet to me they are all from the same root and so to me there is no difference: I am fascinated by the body. How it works, how light changes it, how to create illusion upon it, how to transform it and our reactions to our individual versions of reality.

    So to these ends I am, in no particular order, a mother, a clothes designer, a portraitist, a yoga teacher with several specialisations and a body painter.

    I love technology, so I have about 6 websites, I write, particularly weblog and a bi-weekly newsletter. I have made 11 DVDs……..

    I was born in 1960, the eldest daughter of a fashion photographer who was on a mission to find himself. He did not. The resulting chaos led to a childhood with lots of opportunity for growth. I feel I have taken all of these and run with them. I have had issues with drug and alcohol addiction, anger, abandonment and my body. All of these experiences inform my teaching, my creativity, how I see the world and what I strive towards.

    I worked in the film industry as a beauty make up artist and bodypainter for many years. I was very successful, entering at a time when pop videos exploded into the media. My time was spent with Freddy Mercury, Elton John, Duran Duran and the like. Endless years of mayhem and hilarity that then led me into high-end advertising and fashion work, all of it taking place in various locations all over the world. It was fun but the toll that my drug and alcohol use took finally led to my cleaning up in 1991. This in turn shut down my career, as those who had employed me because I was wild and abstract did not take well to the sober version, and those who had previously shunned me still did not trust me.

    It was an interesting time, 1991: I lost everything: career, apartment, relationship, social life, I was burgled and lost all I had accumulated up to this point and was left homeless, clean and sober, living in a bedsit in Clapham.

    I decided to take up photography full-time. I had been quietly taking pictures for years on set; Portraits and images of my work. I went to Ilford, got them to sponsor me with camera film for a project on Nomads in India and headed East with a Hasselblad and lots of good intentions.

    Arriving in India I realised I had not thought it through at all. Where would I find a nomad? and how would I persuade them to let me take a picture? Slowly it all unravelled and over several months I travelled extensively in Gujarat and then through wider territories and documented aspects of life in India that are now a distant memory for most tribal people. I won awards for the images, had exhibitions, wrote articles and met my first Kundalini yoga teacher whilst sitting in a truck in the Thar Desert….. Life changed drastically from all of these experiences and for a few years I earned my living as a portrait photographer and Kundalini yoga teacher.

    Getting pregnant led to another raft of experiences and www.devotion.co.uk was born from the desire for stability, a way of making sure I could provide for the family and my children in a longer term way. My husband fell ill with Hepatitis C and freelance work became impossible to contemplate.

    I made yoga DVDs based on my teaching and then a collection of traditional yoga clothes which were manufactured in India. This collection was very well received and took me into clothes designing in a bigger way and eventually the shop in Balham emerged. Three years later, a wealth of experience and stress accumulated, I closed the high street premises, moved my production from India to South London, and moved the business into my house. I now have a small but well formed clothing business that is doing well via the internet and one to one clients all over the world.

    So my days are split up between several different streams of endeavour, all of which make perfect sense to me as they are all linked to the body, to my experiences, to my long-term desires, goals and aims.

    My work as a counsellor has emerged through all of the above experiences, I am a portraitist, I write, I teach Kundalini yoga on Wednesdays, I run bodypainting courses passing on all of my vast experience and I design beautiful, original clothes for women over 40.

    This website is my way of pulling all these streams together in a way that puts me at the centre. Having www.carolyncowan.com has allowed me to create order in the different layers of experience and expression, to make sense of it all for myself and then to give clarity to all of you who stumble upon me and my work.

    I have a list of workshops and events so we can meet, I am available to consult on a one to one basis be it for exquisite clothing, counselling, portraiture, yoga or a bodypainting course.

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