Karen Dear
Biography
Karen Dear is a printmaker and painter, originally from Kent and now residing in London. Having lived in Kent for 18 years, this area of Britain still influences her work to this day. Through her artistic education and employment at Kingston University, she has developed her delicate style of depicting the world she once was in. Using her childhood walks and haunts as inspiration, she creates pockets of memories in her prints and paintings alike. Using both the medium of printmaking and watercolour painting, Karen transports you to her favourite places so you too can feel the Kent coast’s sea spray and the dappled sunlight through the trees in Kings wood.
Karen now works and lives as an artist in South West London, coincidentally where her parents first met. By visiting and exploring Kew Gardens where they were once gardeners, Karen takes inspiration from the patterns of the foliage, to the delicate architecture which encases them. With this she has created a series of lino cuts, an ongoing project to create little mementos for all to enjoy. A sense of place is a key aspect in her work, by looking back and capturing these spaces on paper, we are able to view life through someone else's eyes, and cause us too to reflect back on places far from us in time.
Statement - 3 Year Diary
For the past three years I have been creating a physical inner monologue about my sense of place. I used my grandfather's Knightsbridge typewriter in my very draughty London studio to give this piece the authenticity it needed to be a self portrait. This piece of work is a stream of thoughts and feelings from a 20-something year old, living and working in a new city, far away from their small home town in Kent. In this piece there are reflections on literature I have read through the time of writing, places I’ve visited (both fictionally and physically). It’s filled with reflections on old relationships and new, my feelings from the past & the present, and political events of both now and then. Using my grandfather's personal typewriter was a way of connecting back to a past that I am not a part of, knowing that he used the same keys to write his own thoughts and memories down gave this piece an extra layer of time.
Through the lockdown I was only able to visit and type a few times, and at the announcement of the second lockdown in London I decided to leave it unfinished, hoping to start a new chapter somewhere else. I decided to record myself reading back the words I had written over the years, for the very first time. Creating a performative nature to the work and filling in the silence in a time where words are hard to find. This piece is both an installation and performance. In these ever-changing and turbulent times, I feel that looking back is bittersweet. Being stuck in one place, whilst reflecting back to all the places you have been is both a blessing and a curse. The yearning to get up and fly to these places in our memories is something that we are all fighting against. Whilst unable to enjoy the comfort of a day at home that has eluded us in our normal working lives for so long.
This piece of unedited writing, captured on my grandfather’s typewriter over the course of several years, and read aloud for the first time is a slice of myself. More of a self portrait than anything I could have created using a pencil or charcoal. It is just snippets of the endless stream of consciousness that we all have running through our minds. To have created it in a city which feels like it’s running and halting all around us, was a therapeutic balm. To stop and reflect is all we can do with this time we have.
