Karen Howse

Based in North Cornwall, Karen is an artist-wanderer practicing walking, drawing and printmaking. She is nterested in noticing the patterns that connect our minds with our local wild, drawing people together through place-based projects. Her work explores cycles, hinting at a deeper sense of ecological collapse, and a longing for hope, seeing nature as talisman, balm & messenger. ‘She devises simple rituals for her pilgrimages; a fallen Sweet Chestnut tree is redrawn, remembered, and revered; hidden papers, folded in tree hollows, are stained with spores and nibbled by snails; a moment of arrival is recorded in a smudged rained on watercolour; where the familiar becomes unfamiliar and a world is revealed in the microcosm of a pocket of lichen.’

Karen has a BA in Textiles from Winchester School of Art and an MA in Fine Art, from Falmouth University. She has  been an artist in residence at the poet Charles Causley’s home and Dunsland an abandoned National Trust Parkland. In her recent solo exhibition Stones, rocks and other beings, at Lanstefan Arts, she corresponded with mining rocks and an elliptical stone circle on Bodmin Moor.