Karen David
Karen David is an artist and researcher working with fiction as a catalyst for making, and exploring the way materials hold personal narratives. David’s PhD imagined a fictional commune, and using her solo tabletop role playing game, she activated resident avatars, creating new networks of thought through rules, play and imagination.
Works take reference from pop culture, science fiction, stage magic, eco-communities and range from oil painting using cake-decorating and marbling techniques, informational posters, readings and field recordings, tapestries, archives, documentation of road trips, photographs of family dinner tables, curation and storytelling.
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Projects Include:
New Contemporaries 2024, touring The Levinsky Gallery, Plymouth (2024) and ICA, London (2025)
C.A.P. (Conference on Arts and Planning), Kobe, Japan (2025)
The Restless Surge of the Liquid State (2025)
Solo exhibition and 111-page Mulberry Press publication with SE8 Gallery; The Fortune-Telling Fan (2025)
Worcester Museum; ‘Six Forms of Precipitation’ performance at ICA LIVE (2025)
Fraudulent mediums and miracle-mongers’ (2024)
Journal of Contemporary Painting; PhD thesis ‘Creating Myth in Studio Practice Through Fictional Narrative’ (2024)
University of Worcester; ‘Review of Full of Days by Andy Holden’, Journal of Contemporary Painting (2023)
Curator of The Collector’s Room (2020)
JGM Gallery; Short fiction ‘Spirit in the Sky’ for Sally O'Reilly's The Open Arms (2020)
Group exhibition Liquid Crystal Display at MIMA, Middlesbrough and SITE gallery, Sheffield (2019)
Solo exhibition Pure Reason Tint of Violet, VITRINE Bermondsey Square, London (2018)
Visiting artist at Bauhaus Foundation in Dessau, Germany (2019)
Research trip to Judd Foundation, Marfa, Texas and UFO Museum, Roswell, New Mexico; and founder of Cork Lined Rooms (2013-present).
The Restless Surge of the Liquid State, SE8 Gallery, 2025
Arcadia (Season 6, Episode 15), 2024, Oil and powder pigments on found book (The X-Files, Book of the Unexplained, Volume 2, 1997, Jane Goldman), 25x20x6cm
New Contemporaries Live 2025 (Photo Sam Nightingale)
Time At Hogchester Arts
It was wonderful to spend time at Hogchester Arts. The cosy cottage on Hogchester Farm has two rooms and I was fortunate to share my residency time with Paul Kindersley, an artist whom I have admired for a while. We shared jacket potatoes and raisin toast, along with tea and chats at the kitchen table.
As a suburban dweller, being in the rural was an impactful experience. From my suburban lens, my exploration of the land extended to watching Paul feed the chickens, plus an hour spent in a tree house as Paul and I bumped into the architect on a short walk up the driveway. Chantal Powell runs the residency and she and I took a walk around the fields, as well as a breezy and fresh walk along the beach as we watched the fossil hunters scour the pebbles. One evening we all took a walk along Lyme Regis where the film Ammonite (2019) was made that tells the story of local fossil hunter Mary Anning. We stopped for a burger and walked back along the beach watching the full moon over the sea.
During the residency I made a series of watercolours by squeezing dots of acrylic paint straight from tubes in a line through the middle of the paper. Water was added to release the pigment in an organic spilling flow. On top of these paintings I arranged pebbles collected from the beach that I had decorated with iridescent watercolours. The resulting works were a surprising alignment of object, colour, and diagram on paper.
I had packed my marbling equipment with the intention to share a marbling workshop with Chantal and Paul and I was very happy that they were both keen to participate. As always when marbling, a frenzy of activity occurred as more and more sheets of paper were printed, each one revealing something different about the technique and about the individual artist’s style. Chantal used the technique of drawing out floral or fauna image directly on the surface, Paul printed patterns that later would serve as templates for portraits, and I made psychedelic patterns that I left outside in the rain to be washed away.
