Karen King
Contact Details:
studio	Lewisham Art House Limited, 140 Lewisham Way, London SE14 6PD
telephone:	Tel (Mon-Thu): 020 8244 3168
email:	arthouse@dircon.co.uk
website:
fax:	Fax/Ansafone: 020 8694 9011
home
Tel/Fax:	020 8699 2965
Mobile:	0797 1621 385
email:	karen_sking@lineone.net
	Statement My work combines my art practice, painting, with my professional practice (I mean paid), graphic design, specialising in interpretative graphics for the cultural and heritage sectors. ‘Deptford circa 1973’, painting and graphic panel. Is my first work to include its own interpretative graphic panel. The work was initially a response to the first DeptfordX arts festival. I went to primary school in Deptford and wanted to make a work about how Deptford and me have aspired to similar goals yet have retained our ‘character’. It marks my first overtly personal work, inspired by a snapshot taken on the high street. The painting makes use of vividly remembered colours, so I felt it important to display it with the original black and white photograph and so I created the graphic panel. The panel first contained facts about the day that then later developed into a memory-story.
	Beach Baby, painting and graphic panel. Made specifically for the Girl Talk exhibition, part of Women’s Week. Week. I wanted to create a work that was pertinent to women and the story was this time to take the lead role. The story is a sensitive issue and I worked hard so as not to sensationalise the subject for the sake of impact. It stands as simple testimony, the comment perhaps contained only within the ice-cream colours of the painting, allowing the reader/viewer to put it in the context of our current and past reactions to sex and childhood. Combining my artist and designer skills with story telling has become a breakthrough and approaching ideas by use of my personal history has balanced the accessibility of themes and ideas. My life stories are rich but they are ordinary, documenting them provides comment on our climate of (p)raising the mundane to super-star status and celebrity obsession. My tongue and cheek approach to my own self absorption in my own ordinariness is a mirror of how we are encouraged to measure success. I use Deptford heavily to focus the idea of how we bump into ourselves again and again. Deptford is where I went to primary school, made my first holy communion and where now I have my studio. I loathe it and I love it, bred from that subjective familiarity and possessiveness that typically surrounds an area recently thrust into fashion. Deptford and me seem to have shared aspirations and characteristics.			Click the images above to view work. Requires free plugin - click icon to download
	Exhibitions Palindrome-Palimpset Arthouse Gallery, 2002. Girl Talk ARthouse Gallery, 2001 The Art experience Atrium Gallery, London 1997. Solo show 77 Cornhill, London 1997. Absolut Secret Royal College of Art 1996. Artists in Print Atrium Gallery, London 1996. Lottery Update ARthouse Gallery 1995. LondonStrasbourg European Parliament France and London 1995. Southwark Open South London Gallery 1994. ‘Two Really Great Guys’ ARthouse Gallery 1993. The Elephant Press Smith’s Gallery, London 1992. Commission for the South Hall, Horniman Museum 1992. ‘Six’ installation in the South Hall Horniman Museum 1990-1992. ‘Three’ Heaven, London 1987. Bloomsbury Gallery, 1987. Time based exposition selected by Ron Hasledon Reading University, 1985. Landscape into Art, Camberwell School of Art, 1983.