Sculptor/Painter

I find Contemporary British artist Karla Black’s work interesting in many ways but her key influence on my practice this year has been her use of chance and accident.

In her works shown below (from her February 2022 exhibition at Modern Art in London) she has allowed the chance accidents that happened when making them to be a key part of the finished pieces. These works involve placing spots of paint on an acrylic sheet and placing another sheet on top.  Often the spots retain a quite tightly defined shape when compressed in this way. But in several, such as Seen on Time, it looks like a bit of the spot has leaked messily out of the main shape. Rather than reject this as a failure Black includes several of these ‘leaked’ pieces in her recent exhibition

(Black, 2020)

Other works in the exhibition were created by draping paper that had been soaked in ink over radiators and allowing the form of the pieces to be determined by chance, according to how the material fell and set.  The piece below, Thrown Consequences, is one of many forms created this way.

Karla Black, Thrown Consequence, 2022 – one of a series of installation works created by draping cartridge paper soaked in watercolour ink over radiators.

Exhibition at Modern Art Gallery, London, February 2022:

‘Karla Black’s exhibition at Modern Art is comprised of a series of new sculptures made from soaked and dried cartridge paper and watercolour inks. Using only red, orange and yellow inks blended together, the works are each bathed in varying shades of pink or peach. The paper is left to soak, and then hung out to dry over various household objects from which the sculptures gain their shapes and forms. As such, Black’s new works are more pared back than is typical of her sculptures, and the exhibition as a whole seems to question what is most necessary and essential in her work, keeping only the bare bones. This economy of means is adopted by Black both through a reflection upon the past two decades of her practice characterised by acceleration, but also because of the material and psychical conditions of living and making that have been redefined by the pandemic’. (Exhibition guide)