Beechwood sponsors local artist

Karen Purple - Terre Verte
Pennwood House,
Pound Lane,
Cassington,
Oxford OX29 4BN

22 November to 7 December 2008

This new show by Karen Purple is deeply rooted in a profoundly personal and tactile experience of the ‘stuff’ of being in the landscape. She collects plants, leaves, berries and more, that she encounters on her forays into the countryside. She then explores this resource in drawing, in small intimate records, and in making new work through, for example, extracting dyes from this found collection.

The larger paintings, typically oil on canvas, may evolve from this archival material. They evoke a sense of time and place. Images and forms are thoughtfully placed, worked over, even obliterated and redrawn. They may be insistent, or mobile and elusive. Through the work, Karen may reconnect with a particular moment or ‘family’ of encounters and events. Each work may not necessarily come to any specific conclusion but, as with the archive, could function as a journal, a shifting catalogue of things and events, and of Karen’s powerfully driven but tender and sensitive experience of them.

Karen Purple - official website