Karen Warburton’s background of textiles screen printing and graphics has been a major influence in her work, assemblages of shapes that fit together to create layered landscapes of the built environment. Her materials have come from the discard bins, becoming discards that no longer suggest themselves but evoke experiences of the architectural world of both contemporary and traditional designs. Rearranged, recycled and repurposed. The materials nevertheless retain the picture of their previous lives. Karen has explored design with overlaps and layers, playing with positives and negatives repeatedly and persistently, seeing new shapes emerge and recede.
Karen’s colour palette is important but broad and never static. She allows colour to captivate effects of light, space and planes, including the colour of the wall it is hung on, as seen through the negative spaces. Working by overlapping pieces together has become a world of discovery and chance for her.
Recent work sees Karen exploring prints on wood and looking to the influences of Japanese aesthetics and simplicity.