Caroline Z. Hurley is a painter living and working in East Hampton, New York.
Her work begins with fabric — collected since childhood, hand-dyed, hand-painted, torn apart and stitched back together. These intuitive acts of gathering and unmaking form the foundation of paintings that move between restraint and rupture, between the delicate and the electric. Vintage textiles carry time and handling into the work — memory made material. Each painting is assembled and reassembled until something true and irreducible remains.
This body of work began after the 2025 California Eaton fires, which took her family's home. She was struck by the brilliance of what returned — electric greens pushing through ash, wildflowers bolder than before, nature behaving exactly as it should after tragedy. She began painting on that ground.
She understands the work as something that moves through her — guided by forces larger than herself, arriving when she gets out of the way. This work is about what survives. What comes back. What knows how to bloom after fire.
She attended the Rhode Island School of Design.
Previously, Caroline built a textile business, CZH whose work was acquired by F. Schumacher & Co.