Karen Picton’s solo exhibition ‘Land As Material And Meaning’ opens at Galley Steel Rooms, North Lincolnshire

Digswell Arts Trust alumni Karen Picton, who was based at the Farmhouse studio in Stevenage, is exhibiting her work in the Case Gallery at the Gallery Steel Rooms from 9th June – 14th July 2018 in the town of Brigg, North Lincolnshire.

The paintings featured in the exhibition have been created using earth and mud that Karen has collected from her travels around the UK. Karen’s series of artworks not only show her ongoing experimentation of using these materials of the land as an effective painting medium, but also use the material to explore the characteristics of the land on a canvas as places that can become spaces for the mind.
In the catalogue that accompanies Karen’s exhibition, Karen says; “To unearth the true nature of the land, I use earth, clays and rock found in the land as painting materials and through digging below the surface these materials reveal a diversity of colour and texture from the geology of a place but can also hold traces of a history of human involvement”.
Karen creates paintings of the land with the land; reflecting a journey of documentation to represent a place and onwards to an emotional response to the land with more abstract works and comments that “my artworks are visual records of the material and the mind in the land, an inseparable relationship where some essence of each has become clear”.

Karen’s exhibition, ‘Land As Material And Meaning’, is part of the Gallery Steel Rooms 2018 programme that includes seven exhibitions with five one-person shows under the title ‘way-making’, available to early career and emerging artists who are establishing a practice concerned with subject matter as broad as mapping, topography, geology, and informed interpretations of landscape, along with a series of professional development opportunities for artists.
Karen’s show is part of the current main exhibition, ‘A Case for Place’, an exhibition and interdisciplinary place-based project which features the work of nationally and internationally established visual artists, writers and composers whose own work responds to the landscape.
‘A Case For Place’, runs from the 12th May to 23rd June 2018 and is supported by Land2, a creative and practice led research group and Arts Council England.

Gallery Steel Rooms shows the work of contemporary artists, poets and composers who care about “our world; how we see it, live in it, use it”. Alongside the gallery’s exhibitions, The Gallery Steel Rooms also operates an interdisciplinary series of programmes, projects and workshops that are designed to both inform and excite, covering subjects and themes connected to the notions of landscape and place, whilst engaging with regional, national and worldwide environments.

More information on Karen’s ‘Land As Material And Meaning’ exhibition can be found on the Gallery Steel Rooms website here: https://gallerysteelrooms.com/ajde_events/karen-picton-land-as-material-and-meaning/ and more information on ‘A Case For Place’ here: https://gallerysteelrooms.com/ajde_events/a-case-for-place/
More information on the workshops and events that are coming up at the Gallery Steel Rooms can be found here https://gallerysteelrooms.com/workshops-events/ and the work of Land2, which are based at the University of Leeds: http://land2.leeds.ac.uk

Gallery Steel Rooms, Second Floor, The Steel Rooms, 1-5 Springs Parade, Brigg, North Lincolnshire, DN20 8EQ