The ruins of Edward III’s Manor House, once an important royal house on the Thames in Bermondsey, have been excavated but kept half hidden for protection under a grassy hill. History peeps out from underneath the edges. Further along the Thames there is Hampton Court Palace with its great formal gardens. The flowers gave no sense of history and the passing of time except that when I photographed them, they were past their prime and fading. The image I created has a feeling of old-fashioned lace, a keepsake that holds the memory of something precious long since gone.
Royal Vintage Multiples of one photo on sprayed MDF board w 86 cm x h 112cm Framed under glass
TRANSFORMATION 2.0 – Fotografische Objekte
Karin’s solo exhibition Transformation 2.0– Fotografische Objekte was to have opened in the Galerie Altes Haus der Burg Neustadt-Glewe, the oldest military castle in Mecklenburg, Germany in May 2020. Because of Corona Virus the exhibition was postponed. The good news is that it was rescheduled and ran from 12 June 2022 to 21 August 2022.
The banner outside the gallery Altes Haus
Inside the Gallery
The Private View (Vernissage) took place on 12 June 2022 at 11.00 when the Bürgermeisterin, Frau Doreen Radelow, opened the exhibition.
Die Bürgermeisterin of Neustadt-Glewe opening the exhibition
The title Transformation 2.0– Fotografische Objekte marks the changes that have taken place since 1993 when this cycle of work on the last industrial spice-grinding mill, Butlers Wharf, London was first shown in London, Bristol and Hamburg under the title Transformation. Transformation 2.0– Fotografische Objekte includes work which was not in the original exhibition.
The title also refers to the way Karin works with the single unedited photograph as her medium. From the multiples of one, rarely two photos she creates an abstract image. These constructed images, mounted on board and framed under glass, explore through their formal layout and content the complexity of the industrial processes and the transformation of a working industrial mill into an enchanting Aladdin’s cave at the point of its closure. Plant/machinery/cogwheel and plant/spice/flower merge into one organic whole.Karin’s work invites the viewer to consider that something is irretrievably being lost.
The Burg Galerie Altes Haus
It is a particular joy to Karin, to bring this exhibition to Neustadt-Glewe, a delightful small town hugged by the river Elde. In this town her father and his two brothers grew up. Werner, the youngest was the first to die. He was 18. The war broke out and by the end of it, father’s parents had passed away and Otti, the middle son, never returned from the front. Father remained silent about himself and the town where he had briefly set up home as a newly wed man to a girl from Parchim a few kilometres away. Perhaps this exhibition will bring ‘home’ the family she never met; will transform loss and absence into living memory?
Millstone x 2 Multiples of one photograph on board w 93 cm x h 123 cm Framed under glass
The exhibition ran from 6 October to 3 November 2019 at the Lake Gallery, Southwark Park, London.
The exhibition brought together work by over 50 local artists. Some of the works went back to the early years of the group’s existence; some were from the artists’ current practice. Each of the works had been selected by the artist to reflect upon their membership of the BAG and how their practice had developed during that period: reconsidering, reconstructing and reinventing.
Karin put one work into this exhibition:
IN THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER
Background to this work:
Kings’ Stairs Garden in Rotherhithe was beautifully landscaped with a retaining wall of sawn- off tree trunks running alongside Fulford Street. This street leads directly to the river Thames. Time passed and by and by some of the tree trunks were vandalized: fire was set to them – hence the dark charcoal-black look. Here are the urban opposites: creativity to enhance the urban environment and actions to deface and destroy and yet through the later daubing of luminous blue paint creating, by default, something oddly beautiful. She has tried to capture this process as well as referencing the Thames foreshore at Bermondsey.
In the Eye of the Beholder Multiples of one photograph on sprayed MDF board w 85 cm x h 116 cm Framed under glass
This work has been previously exhibited in the South London Women Artists’ show What is Urban? at the Brixton East Gallery in 2015.
Karin was delighted to exhibit in a solo show selected works from her Mill Cycle in the gallery space of the Bergedorfer Windmühle, a museum in her home town Hamburg. She created this body of work over several years and has shown it in solo exhibitions both in London (Tom Blau Gallery) and Bristol (Watershed).
The P&O Mill, Butlers Wharf, London, famous for its grinding expertise, was facing closure when Karin obtained permission to photograph its interior. She used a simple analogue camera to take pictures of spices spilling over machines and to the ground from sacks and bales in a first process of transformation. Today the defunct Mill situated near Tower Bridge is a complex of luxury apartments.
Karin works with the single unedited photograph as her medium. From the multiples of one, rarely two photos she creates an abstract image. These constructed images, mounted on board and framed under glass, explore through their formal layout and content the complexity of the industrial processes and the transformation of a working Mill into an enchanting Aladdin’s cave. Plant/machinery/cogwheel and plant/spice/flower merge into one organic whole. Karin’s work invites the viewer to consider that something is irretrievably being lost.
Geraldine Norman wrote in The Independent: ‘An exhibition of dazzling photomontages at the Tom Blau Gallery is this week’s most exciting (London) show’. Professor Dawn Ades considers that the way Karin uses her medium goes ‘way beyond photomontage’.
Links to articles in the Bergedorfer Zeitung,Hamburger Wochenblatt and Hastings Observer will follow.
Ich habe ausgewählte Werke aus meinem über mehrere Jahre entstandenen Mühlenzyklus vom 17. Mai bis 4. August 2019 in der Galerie der Bergedorfer Mühle gezeigt.
Der Zyklus wurde in Einzelausstellungen in London (Tom Blau Gallery) und Bristol (Watershed) vorgestellt. Geraldine Norman schrieb in The Independent, die Ausstellung ‘of dazzling photomontages’ sei ‘the most exciting (London) show’. Laut Professor Dawn Ades geht meine Art zu arbeiten weit über Photomontage hinaus.
Der Zyklus zeigt die letzten Tage der berühmten P&O Gewürzmühle in Butlers Wharf, London, heutzutage Luxuswohnungen. Ich habe den Speicher mit einer einfachen analogen Kamera fotografiert: Gewürze sickerten aus Säcken und Bällen über Boden und Maschinen und verwandelten den viktorianischen Speicher unweit von Tower Bridge in einen Ort von außergewöhnlicher Schönheit.
Mein Medium ist die einzelne Fotografie . Über meine Imagination wird diese Fotografie durch Wiederholung zu einem neuen formgewordenen Ganzen zusammengefügt. Der Zyklus ist sowohl Hinweis als auch Fragestellung an den Betrachter: geht hier etwas Wichtiges verloren?
Karin showed a key work from her Bankside Power Station Cycle in this group exhibition. The work, Turbine Triptych, was first shown in a 2011 solo exhibition The Power and the Glory at Candid Arts, London.
The Bankside Power Station, darkly lit and immense, seemed like an industrial cathedral. Karin decided on the formal element of the triptych to convey this quality and that the triptych would have to have as the central image the ‘turbine’. There was no one to ask and she had no idea where to find the turbine or indeed what it looked like. Then, deep in the bowel of the building, asbestos contaminated and closed to the uninvited, Karin stumbled on what she was then told were the turbine blades. She photographed a small section. From this shot and its multiples she created an imagined machine that in its detail is of the turbine. She placed it in the centre of this industrial altar. It is sufficiently not the turbine so that the viewer can have his own response. The completed abstract image has a beauty of its own.
Turbine Triptych
Three panels, two are multiples of one photograph and the centre panel multiples of two photographs all mounted on board under glass.
Each 112cm x 82cm
Karin is showing her work Fusion in the Bermondsey Artists’ Group Outpost exhibition at the Shortwave Cafe. The work is part of the Mill Cyclewhich celebrates the magic interior of the now defunct spice mill at Butler’s Wharf in the London Docklands. The created image references Plant (cogwheel/machinery) and Plant (spice).
FUSION
Fusion
(detail)
Multiples of two photos on board
w 93 cm x h 123 cm
framed under glass
Established in 1983 Bermondsey Artists’ Group BAG is an artist-led initiative that supports Cafe Gallery Projects London and creates opportunities for artists who live, work or study in Southwark. This peer-led network is a rare longstanding grassroots collective, maintaining a democratic framework and consistent core values; to support local artists to show their work and develop their practice.
The Shortwave Cafe is a large exhibition space at the former Peek Freans Factory. This factory is well-known for Damien Hirst’s early exhibitions (also the fantastic BAG exhibition Meme 2007) and will sadly in part be demolished by the end of the year.
The exhibition is open from 21 May to 15 June. Opening hours are 10.00 – 20.00 Mondays to Fridays and 10.00 to 18.00 Saturdays. The exhibition is closed on Sundays.
Karin has exhibited her work With Reference to the Tower (Gothic Affinities) at the Hastings Arts Forum Members’ exhibition (Hastings Arts Forum, 36 Marina, St Leonards on Sea, TN38 0BU)from 20 March to 1 April 2018.
WITH REFERENCE TO THE TOWER (GOTHIC AFFINITIES)
Karin sees Tower Bridge as the architectural and benign off-spring of the notorious Tower. From the multiples of a single photograph of one element of the Bridge balustrade through which the Thames is seen (the documentary element) she created an image of a ‘window’ (the imagined) that is – and is not – of Tower Bridge or the Tower, (n)or of ancient Gothic Churches. Bringing together what seems separate or fragmented and yet related is, for her, a bridge to a deeper understanding, and using as her medium a photograph of no great merit is a way of challenging what has and has not merit.
With Reference to the Tower (Gothic Affinities)
Multiples of one photograph on sprayed MDF board
framed under glass
h 118 cm x 87 cm
As part of Coastal Currents and PhotoHastings, Andrea Artz, Alexander Brattell, Colin Booth and Karin took SEA ROAD, the title of their exhibition, as a metaphor for the work that was on show.
“My work in this show follows the gradual building up of litter in the Thames making its way to the sea. In this sense all rivers are sea roads. I include, quite concretely, plastic detritus collected from the Hastings beach in the evening, left there and/or washed up from the sea.”
PS No, I didn’t include it; “the gallery space didn’t like it”.
URBAN THAMES II
Urban Thames II
Multiples of two photographs on sprayed MDF board
h 198 cm x w 103 cm
framed under glass
Private view (showing one of Karin’s works to the right)
Karin was pleased to have been invited by Stephanie Goj to show a selection of her work at Graze on Grand, St Leonards-on-Sea from 18 October to 27 November 2016.
Here is the review from the Hastings Observer of 4 November 2016
Karin’s work Reinvented was selected by Tower Bridge in partnership with Southwark Arts Forum for this exhibition which took place at Tower Bridge in London for seven months in the spring and summer starting on 8th March 2016. Karin exhibited this work for the first time.
REINVENTED
This work brings together, in one created image, the history of the locality on the south-east side of Tower Bridge: The formal arrangements of the photographs reference the squares of Butlers Wharf, the bridge road and the structure of cranes that once lined the wharves. The travelling crane rails live on in the photograph of the cladding of a contemporary building in Shad Thames; the inserted photograph of a bollard, removed from the Thames wall as the locality reinvented itself, witnesses the maritime history of the area. Bringing together what seems separate or fragmented is, for me, a bridge to a deeper understanding, and using as my medium an ordinary photograph challenges what has merit. For information on the exhibition click here.
Reinvented
(studio shot)
Multiples of two photographs on sprayed MDF board
h 198 cm x w 103 cm
to be framed under glass