Don’t Know We’ll See – The Work of Karen Karnes

Don’t Know We’ll See – The Work of Karen Karnes
The life of a legendary master of ceramics (1925– 2016)
Monday, 24 September, 7 pm

Additional to the artists featured in the exhibition Further Thoughts on Earthy Materials, in our accompanying program we present outstanding artists that work with ceramics in remarkable ways. In this event we present the documentation about the american ceramic artist Karen Karnes. Amongst others, she studied with Josef Albers at Balck Mountain College where she later became potter-in-residence and got introduced to artists like Merce Cunningham and John Cage. After two years she left to co-found and establish the Gate Hill Cooperative, an experiment in integrating art, life, family and community. The film from 2008 is directed by Lucy Massie Phenix, who has been a friend and photographer of Karnes since the late 1960’s when they were neighbors in the same artists’ cooperative community in upstate New York. She comments on the film:
“Her work grows organically from her body and from her life. She has been working nearly every day for over 50 years and her work continues to have a strength, a quiet grace and year by year an astonishing newness. he constancy, the slow and even pacing, the focus and simplicity of her life are the context of her art… which comes not from her head, not from her ambition nor even from experimentation. The film accompanies Karen to some of the natural places that have inspired the sense of mystery in her sculptural work.”