Karla Black

Glasgow artist Karla Black makes process-based sculptural pieces, often using familiar domestic materials such as Vaseline, clothing and flour. Both her ingredients and her method - intensive periods spent meticulously creating abstract tableaux - inevitably evoke feminine occupations such as baking and nursing.

The combination of rigorous method and fragility found in Eva Hesse's sculptures from the late 1960s provides the background against which Black charts her site-specific interventions. 

Although Black's art projects ideas about healing, the ritualistic element of her practice is more self-conscious than it was to those earlier Performance artists she admires, such as Carolee Schneemann or Gunter Brüs. Although previously Black made public performances, her work now exists as an installation artefact, or as a kind of indirect self-portrait.

Karla Black (b. 1972) studied at Glasgow School of Art and the Stadelschule, Frankfurt, and has exhibited nationally and internationally over the past six years.

Recent exhibitions include

• Rheinschau, Art Cologne Projects (with Transmission Gallery),
• a solo show at Mary Mary, Glasgow, both 2004,
• and Babak Ghazi-Karla Black at S1 Artspace, Sheffield, from 11 March to 10 April 2005.

Reference Sarah Lowndes, Karla Black, Frieze, issue 89, March 2005
 

‘The work comes out of ideas around the status, presentation and reconstitution of formless matter, as in mess or waste, in places that can be seen as public, institutional and/or commercial.

Psychoanalysis is the main theoretical interest, in terms of how it relates to psychological and art historical formlessness, and the relationship of both categories to unconscious violent and sexual urges.

Materials used include medicines for minor ailments, old clothes, carpets, foodstuffs, household cleaners and toiletries, often along with harder or more structural art-making elements like glass, cardboard, wood, mirror or paper and paint. Recently I have taken the formless materials through a process of tentative repression, and have been concentrating on the level of attractiveness in the various sculptures and installations made. The hope is that the work can elicit at least an impetus towards physical response.

Essentially, then, I make different configurations with or from mess or formless matter. Not in a purely gestural sense, since there is always intent, a support (plinth/frame/stage), and evidence of a decision-making process; the things are almost objects, or only just objects.

I look at the mess made by men throughout art history in movements such as Viennese Actionism, Abstract Expressionism, Land Art and Anti-form, and think about how that relates to the gestural body within feminist performances carried out, for example, by Carolee Schneemann and Bobby Baker. My work happens in amongst these things.

In ‘Total Care’, 2004, there was a conscious muting of materials that, historically, have been used in an angry, expressive manner. There is also something of an attempt at beauty, especially in ‘Push Push’ and ‘The Target’, 2004. And there is a domestication of both Land Art and Abstract Expressionism in ‘Better and Square One’, also of 2004.

The work is always, to a certain extent, site specific in that I respond, albeit subtly, to a gallery space or at least think about where the objects will end up before and during making them. The sculptures and installations are never really finished until they are in place, and are most often destroyed when an exhibition is over.

 Karla Black, January 2005