Caroline Morlat
Caroline Morlat is a poet and visual artist who merges language, emotion, and technology. After a career in tech and public relations, she turned fully to art in 2024, creating delicate, image-based works through AI, rooted in her twenty-year practice as a writer. Author of five poetry collections and now exploring photography, her work reflects a deeply personal universe where words give rise to visual forms.
Country France
The beginning
What led you to venture into being an artist initially?
Suffering and the love of beauty.
I needed to do something with my emotions, my feelings, to make something beautiful out of a long period of psychological suffering, my whole twenties in fact, when I felt I didn’t belong anywhere. I started writing when I was still in business school, after an impossible love on the other side of the world. I’d always been in love with words. Poetry was a natural first step in my artistic work. I remember exactly how I wrote my first verse. It was one evening in my student room near Paris. I rewrote the same line maybe 200 times, without exaggerating, until I found that it conveyed exactly the beginning of what I had in my chest that night. In all my subsequent writing, precision and accuracy have been my obsessions, along with beauty.
A little over a year ago, 20 years, 9 books and 8 songs later, I started experimenting with generative AI solutions, and found a terrain of expression I’d never imagined for myself. I knew I’d always had images in my head, but suddenly I could give birth to them. It was a revelation. And in a way, I like to think that I write my images. My prompts are in fact a natural extension of my years of writing. Except that now the poetry is in the images, not in the words that describe them.
How long have you been an artist?
20 years
Where you apprehensive or confident taking the step of becoming an artist?
Confident in the fact that I’m an artist, that it defines me more than anything else. Very worried about how to make a living from it. You may know the quote “you don’t live by poetry, you die by it”, I was afraid of that. The weight of not earning any money and having to work in the corporate world at regular intervals oppressed me enormously. Not to mention that my dark years were at risk, but I now realize that it was poetry that saved me.
Perks & Struggles
What are the perks of being an artist?
Space. Space to be who I am. Room in my head to lose myself in daydreams. Space for silence. Room to look. Room to live by the sea, far from the cities I find too violent. Room to give priority to my great love, the woman who shares my life. And a lot of joy. Every creation is a joy. It all adds up to a wonderful life. Free. I’m trying to push back the limits of my freedom as much as possible, freedom to think, to see the world, to shape it. It will be a lifetime’s work. I find it very honorable as a human being.
And on the flip side, what are the struggles you face?
I still need a bit of extra money, but it’s less and less, and that’s a great relief. Perhaps I suffer a little from isolation. I like people, artists in particular, with whom I often feel in tune, but I tend to remain isolated. I don’t think it has anything to do with the fact that I’m an artist, I’m a bit autistic.
Work-life
Do you separate your work an private life?
Yes and no. I’m an artist all the time, it defines me, it defines my way of being in the world. In that I can’t separate. But in terms of my schedule, I try to keep it compatible with my wife’s. And she’s very supportive. So outside the hours when I’m alone at my desk, we still spend time talking about my work. I share my creations with her, of course, but also my thoughts and projects. Still, there are plenty of times when I keep my computer, phone and pens at a distance. To love her. And to cut away and come back with a chest full of new things to express.
What are the sacred tools you couldn’t work without?
Computer, telephone, pens, paper or notebook.
Has art helped you in your life journey?
Absolutely.
To make sure that all my suffering isn’t in vain, for a while, first of all. “Les fleurs du mal” is Baudelaire, but it applies to all cursed people. I feel like I’ve been cursed for more than fifteen years. But I’ve made flowers out of them. Poems, books and songs.
But after that, writing allowed me to lead my true love to me. I wrote her letters without seeing her for several years. We weren’t allowed to be together for various reasons. She wouldn’t write me back. I was dying of love for her and of the impossible, I wrote poems about her almost every day, everything was gray. Then one day she called me and told me that my letters had turned her life upside down and that she wasn’t going to fight it anymore. We’ve been together ever since.
My writing never made me any money, but it gave me the great love of my life. We wrote a book about it, the two of us. Maybe it’ll come out one day.
Rowing
Life, too narrow in its airy approach,
Wears necklines — charm, unseeing —
In its noble lining, its watched, its well,
Its screws without fences, its mind, freely fleeing.
Then comes the writing I do not understand,
Like a vast scratch that brings me back to myself —
Space and vague path, sharp stones, blurry line,
Exquisite sentinels of the tension in my cheeks.
Gathered beside, I stumble upon you
Who roughs up the piers that guarded the sawdust
And the trees and the forgetting of an outer rule
Over the logic of cry — listen, without Sardinia.
And yet when I strike, it is allowed by absence,
By the coma of cadences imposed by the grant
Of an escape that thinks, that replies, and that drinks.
And limits, intact, do not exist.
My confusion sinks. Feelings! Forgetting.
To love, to write on a slope, verse, coming, let it be —
Held in movement, opposed, unthinking,
Intentional and beautiful, surprising and chosen.
—contrAmIrale
Retrospective
What are some important lessons you have learned as an artist?
I’ve been looking for recognition for my writing for a very long time, but I haven’t got it and probably never will. On the other hand, today I have real recognition for my figurative work, but I take it without investing too much in it. I’ve come to realize that recognition isn’t all that important, except to one person, and she loves every particle of my twenty years’ work.
What is the purpose of art according to you? And what is the purpose of yours?
Art brings people together. It touches on that intangible part of us that defines us as human beings, in the best of our sensibilities.
In my art, I express my sensitivity. I want to convey beauty. I see it everywhere. Everything is beautiful.
Future
Where do you want to be in 5 years?
In the same place, in my house by the sea. Having made progress in my quest for intellectual freedom, Loving my wife more and more. Having created works in which I have surpassed myself. Having an international art scene, perhaps. Having met great people.
Sharing is caring
Any pearls of wisdom you would like to share to anyone who is thinking of becoming an artist?
Even in the most difficult moments, try to always think, even if it’s almost untouchable in yourself, that life can be better. That less gloomy days will come. And always leave room for the unexpected.
Caroline Morlat Poems
All images courtesy of Caroline Morlat, via snobbyfreelancer Get Featured
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