artist statement
My practice explores landscape and the shifting sense of place it holds. I am interested in the ways in which land carries memory, atmosphere, and history, and how these qualities are experienced, imagined, and reinterpreted through painting and sound. Working with cold wax, acrylic, and mixed media, I build and remove layers to create textured surfaces that echo both the physical structures of land and sky and the more intangible impressions of memory and emotion. Increasingly, I employ thin veils of acrylic, using colour not only as a visual element but as a vital tool for conveying mood, light, and the emotional resonance of place. Observation is often my starting point: sketching, photographing, and walking within the environment to become attuned to its shifting qualities. Yet the work that emerges in the studio is not simply a record of what I have seen. It is shaped equally by memory, imagination, and the sensory traces that remain after leaving a place.
More recently, I have extended this process through sound, recording the sonic character of a landscape and layering in my own voice as a quiet acknowledgement of presence. This allows me to approach place not only visually but also through listening, rhythm, and resonance. Ultimately, my aim is to create immersive work that moves between reality and dream, evoking not just the outward appearance of a place but the sensation of being within it—its atmosphere, its memory, and its enduring presence.
artist bio
Karen Eames is a semi-abstract landscape artist based in Chandlers Ford in Hampshire. Karen paints in mixed media, oils and acrylics. She grew up in Winchester, Hampshire and draws her inspiration from the landscapes of Hampshire, the west coast of Ireland, Cornwall and other wild landscapes. Karen’s medium changes dependent on the landscape she is trying to capture.
While she developed a career in nursing, she longed to paint and study art. She achieved her lifetime dream when she studied Fine Art at Winchester School of Art and Design graduating with a first class honours degree in Visual Arts in 2004 followed by a masters in Fine Art in 2007.
Karen is inspired by the wild places of this world often sea and rocky shores. She draws on her Celtic origins to give her paintings an untamed emotional and spiritual connection to a place. Her paintings often convey the drama and movement of nature and previous ancestral links with the landscape.
She recently went on a residency to the Burren Art College and the experience of being submerged without distraction in a wild landscape enabled her to develop her practice. Currently, she is responding to the Cornish coastline investigating fine layers which gives a strong sense of rhythm and movement using colour and form to evoke a sense of place.
Karen was a wildcard artist on Sky Arts Landscape Artist of the Year. Her work is in private collections worldwide. She has exhibited extensively in London and the south of England.
Next year she is embarking on a collaboration with musician and composer, Dominic Beeton on a residency in Provence, France.
artist gallery
