Karen is an artist who curates, writes, lecturers and workshops around the theme of fictional narratives and fictional rooms, weaving the historical and the imagined together.
In 2018 David was awarded a studentship for a practice-led PhD with a studio focus on mythmaking, fictional narrative, communes and para-anthropology. Her practice examines themes and notions of the occult with reference to consumerism and the domestic and is often led by narrative. Through the use of materials, mediums and subcultures such as tie-dye, crystals and The X-Files, her work hovers between cynicism and sincerity, making space for experiment, magic and mythmaking.
Her research has taken her to the Bauhaus in Dessau and to the Southwest American Desert to explore landscape and mythologies and to inform an ongoing project of a fictional artists’ community where residents investigate links between post-painterly abstraction, new age memorabilia and new possibilities in gardening.
2018-2022 PhD candidate (Fine Art), University of Worcester
2012 MA Fine Art, Wimbledon College of Arts
2004 BA (Hons) Mixed Media Art, University of Westminster