Karen Ulph is well known for her dreamlike abstracts. There is a wonderful experience to be had as a viewer in that every time you look you find something new. Her work is heavily influenced by both the places in which she has lived, and those through which she’s traveled. Moving to Shropshire in 2014 from the south coast she now has a studio at home where she has been quietly working on building a new body of work.
Karen Ulph talks about her work…
“I love feeling the wildly different landscapes as you travel and how through our connection to them, they shape us. Getting to know Shropshire and North Wales has just been wonderful, there are so many hidden gems and all kinds of wilderness. The thing that thrills me the most is feeling the magic that is held within the land still. When I was a child, as a family we moved country a lot. It was a great experience in many ways to be infused with various diverse cultures, soaking up folk and fairy tales of all kinds from the places that we traveled.”
“All of my pieces have their own personalities. In the beginning I spend a great deal of time mixing colour and writing directly onto the canvas. Prayers, lyrics, mantras and other kinds of written devotions are lovingly scribed into the canvas in the first few layers. Following this is a process of piling on and scraping off paint, making whimsical marks with pencil, scratching, smudging. The canvases are turned in many different directions as they form and find balance. Once they begin to take shape I spend more time looking at the paintings than making marks on them. As they develop, their personalities begin to form and it is at this point they all spend time outside of the studio, hung around the house where I can see them on a daily basis. Being engaged with them in this way I can slow things down as the final gentle refinements are made. It’s the most precarious part of the journey that we share, the possibility being that too much of any move made may result in a whole new direction being taken. There comes a point where everything just feels peaceful when looking at them, this is when I know there is nothing more to be done and they are complete.”
Below are a selection of our favourity peices on display. You can also Click here to view the full collection of work available by Karen Ulph
