Featured visual artist
Karen Cunningham
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From Jan 2008 - Jan 2009 Glasgow based artist Karen Cunningham was the Scottish Arts Council Amsterdam Artist in Residence. |
Karen Cunningham studied photography at Edinburgh College of Art before graduating from the MFA program at Glasgow School of Art in 2003.
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Her sculptures, photographs and floor-based work are made from generally available materials including rocks, magazines, CD’s and bricks. They possess a rudimentary aesthetic, appearing experiential or performative and negotiate the acts of communication and transformation. |
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“I make art as hypothesis - the artworks are presented as propositions. Science Fiction, Land art, technology and notions of free will inform my work and can be summarised as an interest in the possibility of the ‘individual’ within society.
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Operating both as relic and as technology, the materials and methods I use are specific yet generally available.
The aim is to elicit a reconsideration of the objects and forms that evokes a relationship with the viewer that is at once ancient and contemporary.” |
From January 2008 and January 2009 Cunningham was the Scottish Arts Council artist in residence in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. As well as prolonged periods of studio-based development, she pursued research and site visits.
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“Trips such as the ones made to the province of Drenthe to visit and document the Hunebeddens and Smithson’s Broken Circle, Spiral Hill were planned prior to the residency, whilst visits to sites of cultural and geographic interest in Canada came out of the new directions which my work began to move towards. |
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These experiences were accompanied by exposure to a wide variety of works of contemporary art throughout The Netherlands, Berlin and in Warsaw. My preoccupation with using rocks within my work gave way to a focus on the body and I become interested in communicating a direct relationship between the artist and the materials.
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More and more I was making work in relation to the human form or scale and by the end of the residency I was using my body as both subject and tool, the application of paint by hand developing into face and body prints.” |
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Recent exhibitions include:
For further information on the residency:
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