Karen Purple, 'The Solidity of Peat'

Our past, present, and future is ultimately connected to place.

Karen Purple is an artist concerned with how her relationship with the landscape is mediated through memory. Light, reflection, movement and touch are all elements that inhabit the surface of her paintings. The application of oil paint may be subtle and adventurous, subject matter concealed or glimpsed. It is the artists concern on how memory is never accurate, it distorts, selects and manipulates and her use of paint to some extent mimics the subject. The working process is about the impossibility of trying to capture a remembered response, of allowing the materiality of the medium to offer up its own interpretation.

This elusive quality of painting is what keeps the artist returning again and again to a familiar place. She hopes that each visit allows her to absorb more meaning, to gain a greater experience of her understanding of the world.

Each visit enables research into the social and geographic histories. The collecting of organic and found matter that finds its way back to the studio,

the fascination with craft and industry of place (with its associated materiality of wool, fabric, lace etc), all connect her with the past and the present.

It is the realisation that the almost mystical relationship between materiality and meaning, the very essence of painting, is part of a continuum. It can only ever be a static medium that exists in one sole moment of time

Karen Purple has a first class (hons) degree in fine art and studied painting for 2 years with Turps Banana (2016-18). She works from her studio near Oxford and makes regular research trips to her childhood home of Suffolk. The last three years she has been able to participate in residencies on the west coast of Ireland which has enabled a rich and ongoing project to develop.

She has exhibited widely in the UK and was selected for the Discerning Eye and the Threadneedle Prize at the Mall Galleries, London, and the RWA, Bristol. She has had solo exhibitions with public and private galleries, participated in the Affordable Art Fair and produced work for commission. Work is held with the Art UK public collection as well as private collectors UK and internationally.