Member since Friday 28th Oct, 2011
Karen has enjoyed working with different media over the last 20 years culminating in successful exhibitions at galleries in Lancashire and Cumbria
As a landscape painter she draws inspiration from the coast around Wales and the fells and becks of Cumbria where she spends a lot of time. More recent paintings reflect the urban landscape closer to home around Manchester, where the structures and buildings in the town and city are a source of fascination.
She is currently a student at Kendal College taking a Foundation Degree in Drawing with the University of Cumbria where she has developed her interest in printing.
She finds the quality of marks made in the process of printmaking particularly fascinating and has produced prints inspired by different sources from the Cumbrian landscapes to the styles of the seventies and more recently, the collections at Kendal Museum.
The versatility of printed images can be seen in her work in the installations, ?Life in the 70s? where she printed her own wallpaper from a collagraphed plate and ?Cabinets of Wonder? where she used various printing techniques to create images of birds, butterflies and beetles as objects in her cabinets.
The natural world has become the focus of her recent work ?The secrets of the Wood?. Through her experiments with different printing techniques she captures the beauty and forms of a wood that lies next to the busy M6 and is probably unnoticed by the many who drive past it.
Workshops
Keen to share her skills and enthusiasm about printing Karen has started to run workshops in which she encourages experimentation using some of the basic techniques in printmaking including monoprinting, drypoint etching and collagraph. With reference to the natural world, her monoprint workshop used found natural materials as well as photographic sources to produce simple beautiful images.
