ON EXHIBITION @ The Centre Beaudesert
HOME IS WHERE ONE STARTS FROM
KAREN STONE 12 FEB - 26 MAR 2022
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Using domestic floral patterns and recycled cotton and linen clothing, these large-scale handmade paper images are translations of Karen's memories and feelings of home.
"In my family homes flowers were everywhere; on the walls and bedspreads, on Mum’s frocks, and Nana’s best china. In this body of work, flowers are presented as a metaphor for the social conditioning I experienced as a female child born in the 1950s. The rendering of a rose for example, can instantly transport me to my grandmother’s kitchen and afternoon tea. Or the colour blue sends me to my father’s home, with him seated in his lounge chair expressing his disappointment and concern about my life choices", says Karen. |
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"By recycling clothing from friends, family, and people unknown, a sense of their presence and memories is brought into the work. Through the process of pulping the fabric and ‘painting’ with these pulped fibres, the clothing is transformed into new interpretations of the floral images of my childhood.
This imagery and materiality combines our stories and experiences of past homes, both real and imagined, and brings them into the present."
Also on show is LIVING WATER: in search of equilibrium exhibition by Annique Goldenberg.
About the process …
"I find hand papermaking a lengthy and physical process of art-making. The performative act of creating these pulp images strongly revives memories of homes I’ve lived in; both as a child with family, and as an adult in share houses. The sensory experience of pulp and handmade paper, its colour, opacity, texture, strength, and the crackling sound the pulp images make when they move, conjure up for me a palimpsest (a page of superimposed stories) of confusing emotions relating to home. It is precisely these evocative qualities of handmade paper that are vital in the expression of these personal stories." Karen Stone