Karen Howse - Artist Explorer

I am a North Cornwall artist explorer, practicing walking, drawing, printmaking and assemblage. I am interested in the patterns that connect our minds and natural places, and my place and project based work aims to cultivate empathy. 

 The practice is quietly attentive to rhythms, cycles and the edges of a day. I devise small acts of attention for my visits; Sweet Chestnuts, redrawn, remembered, revisited; folded hidden papers in tree hollows, stained with spores, a moment of arrival recorded in a smudgy rained on watercolour, where the familiar becomes unfamiliar and a world is revealed in the microcosm of a pocket of lichen. 

Distillation happens through the printmaking process; skeleton leaves form impressions of place on soft paper, ghost printed veils of ink in indigo and ochre, suggest the shifting atmosphere of memory, tracing a path of thought, of ink, of noticing. These drawings and prints are both prayer and experiment, a mapping of inner and outer geographies, a meditation on the nature of time and finding our way home to nature.