Artist Statement

Karen is a ceramic artist and designer, a fine artist and a feminist.

She is a woman who has faced anxieties throughout life due to the social constructs that society has created around her identity and her role as a woman. It is important to her to make the work a personal journey, exploring the past and the present to tell a story and to feel a confidence in accepting and supporting the differences within herself and others.

As a fine artist Karen explores how women are depicted in the media and through film, how the female form is represented, and whether the objectification of women is still a concern in todays society. The movies and other media are still drawing attention to the sexual identity of a woman rather than an intellectual one. We identify ourselves with the mirror image we are faced with, the character chosen to portray us.

Karen is interested in connecting the body and mind through art, she experiments with numerous ways to express emotion through an intuitive and dynamic process when manipulating the clay. By using her own body to shape the clay she has maintained a movement in her work which cannot be achieved through traditional methods, this is demonstrated in the work “Punch” Vessels and “Pinch” Vessels She continues the serendipitous nature of her projects by using alternative firing methods such as smoke and saggar firing.

Using her research into women’s perceived body image in films, media and the current issues faced by women in an increasingly volatile world, she hopes to highlight the mental health difficulties that women are dealing with due to sexual harassment, discrimination, gender stereotyping, body confidence barriers and domestic abuse.

Karen’s intentions are to direct her work towards promoting conversations and debate about how we move forward in accepting ourselves for who we are and gaining an understanding about the various perceptions of body image that we are bombarded with daily.

Part of Karen’s practice has a socially engaged element where she gathers primary knowledge and awareness of the struggles some women endure which also allows them to reveal their anxieties through the medium of art and ceramics, this is shown through her works in the WOMAN Project such as ‘Mastectomy’, ‘Object’ and ‘Social Media’, a body of work that is an ongoing project to gather as many stories as possible and start many conversations between participants and viewers.

Karen Henry