Karen ELKINGTON

Karen Elkington believes art is uniquely suited to the task of exploring and communicating ideas about our shared world. In her graduate body of work entitled The Sitting Room she is tackling impending environmental crisis and our current apathetic response. Her 2D and 3D work merges elements of two traditional genres, the interior and the seascape, to expose the impact of our comfortable lifestyles on the environment. The sleeping figures, the beds, couches and armchairs placed in strange suggestive panoramas speak of our failure to act decisively to combat climate change, rising sea levels and islands of floating plastic waste. We are in effect all sleeping. Her energetic gestural approach to mark making and colour is intended to be both unsettling and appealing, leaving the viewer uncertain in much the same way we experience our natural environment. We can choose to see only the ‘pretty’ scenery or we can look at the more honest picture. In some ways, the lone figures set in the vastness of nature in the paintings and drawings are reminiscent of the Romantic tradition of the late 18th to mid 19th centuries. However Elkington’s 21st century approach re-examines our relationship with nature and finds discord in place of salvation. The final two mixed media works in the couch series contain computer code and formulae on exercise paper suggesting that science offers both the Unbiased truth and possible solutions. Maybe humans can use their combined power to good cause rather than spiralling towards the Loop Loop End.