Karen Black works across painting, ceramics and sculpture to explore the body as a site of both trauma and resilience. Her practice operates in the tension between abstraction and figuration; and myth and autobiography. For Black, painting is not mere representation but embodied thinking: a cyclical, recursive process of emotional archaeology in which paint is laid down, scraped back and softened until what remains is less an image than an accumulation of energies. Rooted in a politics of care and attention to the historically invisible (particularly the stories of women and displaced communities) her work avoids resolution and didacticism alike. What it offers instead is a space of radical empathy, where softness becomes a form of resistance.
