karen nickell artist statement
I use the traditional craft technique of embroidery as a starting point working with the sewing machine at full speed and without a foot guard so the thread flows from the needle in a fluid way while I move the fabric freely beneath it.  The embroidery is an intimate, intense, physical process.  At times it takes over and I get lost in the flow of the thread, following rather than leading it. I then transform the embroideries, not by hybrid combinations but sequentially in quite discrete layers, by pushing the work through multiple processes, media and disciplines. The results are surprising and ambiguous and question any fixed reading of the work as textiles, painting, photography or sculpture. Conjoin Series: These are squares of silk thread and artist pigment bound onto wooden panels of Marble Dust Gesso. The colours and textures of the silk and pigment equal each-other in intensity; they are conjoined but retain their individual identity. Magical Reality Boxes: These miniature worlds focus and distort the embroideries by the use of lenses and mirrors to intensify their 3-dimensional physicality, move the work toward abstraction and illusion and suggest the co-existence of a simultaneous magical reality. Installations: Fresnel lenses refract digital projections to transmogrify the embroideries into a kaleidoscopic myriad of images, with a holographic 3-dimensional quality that confuses the eye.  These installations explore tensions of scale, texture, transformations of reality and physicality and the viewer’s experience.
home | gallery | artist statement | biography | contact

© Karen Nickell 2008