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Tuesday 17 January 2012

artist showcase #9

This week, I asked lovely Karys to answer a few questions about her creative endeavours.


1. Can you give us a little bit of your background?

Surprisingly my least favourite subject at school was art, so who knew I would end up here. I have always been more creatively minded, rubbish at reading maps but can recall a place by seemingly insignificant details or very particular images.
I studied Fine Art at college for 2 years, worked my socks off in a gap year to fund my education (no fancy travelling stories I am afraid) and am now in my final year on a Fine Art degree at a specialist arts university, which I beyond love.
All my work tends to be very fragile, a nightmare for transporting! I am interested in using different contexts to inform my practice, such as an archival process, archeology, alchemy and the laboratory trope - using repetitive and demanding meticulous investigations, in order to create a series of test pieces.
The idea of an impossible process is something I am constantly looking to.


2. Did anything in particular make you go into your field of work?

I have always been a collector, and understanding why and how I can translate and incorporate this into my practice, has brought my working style to a new level.
I am often very print and textile based, but I accumulate and have a constant desire to reclaim, this engagement with material is really important to me.


3. What inspires you?

The idiosyncratic, the fantastical, residue and the trace.
In day to day life I find curiosity in unlikely places, even in an art gallery, I get stuck looking at a collection of dust in a corner rather than any painting.
I find myself fascinated by the idea that all items in our museums were pulled from dust and were hidden in waste. Navigating through a junk shop is one of my favourite past times.


4. How do you work?

I hardly stop. I experiment and investigate constantly to see where things will end up. I use a very broad lexicon of materials. I have 7 toolboxes (2 extra large) full of tools, I am quite handy to be friends with in that sense! I use anything from melted soap to translucent bathroom sealant and gold leaf, but my work always comes back to textiles, I knit and sew a lot and this always influences my practice. I also really enjoy writing, and my dissertation, which is hopefully getting published, is all about our proximity with dust.
Even though this, and addressing issues such as our obsession with cleanliness, greatly interests me, it is probably the worst conversation to start at a party. When I am making I like to be warm and cosy with a handy supply of Snickers bars, when I am writing I listen to French Electro as loud as it will go, we all have our quirks.


5. What's your favourite medium to work with?

I love tracing paper and printing onto things I shouldn't. I have fedmany things into my printer which it does not thank me for, having broken and jammed it more times than I can count.


6. Which piece of work are you most proud of?

More than anything I am most proud of my writing. I never thought I would be as interested in theory and research as I am now, I never thought I would be able to contribute new information to a field, and I never thought someone would want my work to be published. Finding through writing and investigation has made an unbelievable difference to my life and how I view everyday, so much so that I now want to go on to study Phd. I can't afford it right now, but once I have a stable job I am aiming to continue and save up to either work on my doctorate full time or part time. It feels like the next step for me, and there is nothing I want to do more.


7. What are you upto right now (work-wise)?

At the moment I am looking at the dissection of dust and the discarded and in particular the contents of vacuum cleaner bags, looking at how a separation of the individual elements can bring each fragment back to the pure. A sanitation occurs and each vital part no longer seems dirty. I am looking at dust in transformation, the potential it holds, and the energy spent to create it.


8. Anything else you think we should know?

The best advice I was given at university was that if you are stuck, which often can hold you back for weeks on end, just make anything. It will always lead to something new. Never give up, and even if what you are studying isn't the most exciting party topic, if it holds your curiosity that is all that matters!

See more here:

Website.
Blog.
Twitter.
Email: 0karys@gmail.com

8 comments

  1. Awesome stuff! Really enjoyed this post - I can't wait to check out more of her work.

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  2. this gets me feeling really creative! what beautiful work!

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  3. "when you are stuck, just make anything" the best advice! It is always nice to read about how other people work, makes me feel motivated to just go out and do things!

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  4. this is really weird, but i think she goes to my uni! haha. i really love her work, it's so beautiful. i love the little 'gems', they're completely fascinating. amazing stuff. x

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  5. I love everything about your blog! All the pictures are so cute!
    I am now following you!

    Amelia xx

    http://wearableartblog.blogspot.com

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  6. That newspaper and gold piece is beautiful, so creative and a breathe of fresh air from modern-day art! Thanks, this interview is great :) xo

    http://simplesophiecn.blogspot.com/

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  7. Really enjoyed reading this! x

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  8. those feathers look so pretty displayed like that

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Thank you for your sweet comments :) if you have any questions please tweet them to me @beinglittle ! x

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