About

Caroline L.A. Wheeler (Linka Nowell) is a UK based artist and material researcher whose practice is grounded in material-led enquiry. She understands object, image and archive as active sites shaped by migration and displacement. Her work moves between jewellery, photography, text and sculptural installation, with worn form functioning as both artefact and action, activated through performance and translated across object, image and text.

Walking and prolonged witness operate as embodied methods, generating trace, contact and encounter across sites marked by movement and diaspora. Auto-ethnography intersects with archival research, allowing personal and inherited histories to sit alongside broader systems of measurement, provision and control embedded within matter, material life and culture..

Environmental and material considerations are central to the work. Favouring re-use and carefully sourced materials, she works with found matter, inherited objects and site-responsive elements, foregrounding the social and ecological conditions through which materials circulate, accumulate value and carry displacement.

Her family history of wartime displacement from Poland to Siberia, East Africa and eventual resettlement in the UK informs her practice’s sustained engagement with diaspora and migration. Having lived and worked across four continents, this experience grounds her commitment to examining how identity is negotiated through material, image and place.

Linka Nowell — Linka is her childhood name, self-given when unable to pronounce the rolling ‘r’ of Karolinka as a young child, and used by family. Growing up in the UK during the 1980s, when Poland remained geographically and politically distant to many, Caroline, the English parallel, was also used. Both names were used interchangeably, shifting with context and community. Nowell is her maiden name. Following her father’s passing, it took on renewed significance. With research engaging questions of identity and belonging, returning to Linka Nowell marks both reclamation and familiarity, an anchor within the ongoing negotiation of self.