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Karen Heald

Wrexham
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As a visual artist, filmmaker and researcher I am exploring the concepts of time, site and creativity from a painterly perspective. Through a variety of media primarily video, installation and photography, I have evolved my own poetic visual language that engages with the differences and similarities between painting and film, creating a language of 'painterly reverie' that communicates difficult social issues with oblique, visual stanzas. 

My artwork has evolved out of working site-specifically and on international residences. I have a collaborative ethos within the production of much of my work. Engaging with fellow visual artists including painters and applied artists I have also collaborated with sound artists and dancers. A particular significant and successful collaboration for over ten years has been with glass artist and educator Chris Bird-Jones. Collectively we are known as Bird-Jones & Heald (www.bird-jonesandheald.co.uk).

The concept of 'in-between-ness' in my practiced-based PhD (2014) explored time, creativity and its relationship to video, site-specificity, and the philosophical complexities of arts and science collaborations. 

As a progression from undertaking artist-in-residency placements, collaborations have emerged with other creative practitioners, scientists of different professions and psychiatric patients. This research as collaborative practice is set within the context of contemporary art, arts and science research, feminist action, participation and site-responsive approaches (www.in-between-ness.co.uk).

A complex collaborative methodology has been established through the performative use of time-based media whilst engaging with the psychoanalyst, linguist and philosopher, Julia Kristeva's concept of the semiotic chora. My working methodology draws on this notion as a preverbal and creative space that relates to rhythms, colours and trace. Using audio-visual technologies, the research expands on Kristeva's chora in relation to time and melancholia and also, as a way to further address these vulnerable states, identifies a number of new concepts: 'transitory strata', the 'unconscious thetic' and 'in-between-ness'.

My outcomes are manifested as 'dream films' echoing the ephemeral and transitional spaces of the mind; the imaginary; reverie and states between wakefulness and sleep; the unconscious and layers of consciousness such as that of the creative or the depressive and psychotic who travels between several time zones simultaneously. Through painterly, poetic non-linear video narratives, these 'in-between' spaces are played out. The films aspire to be beautifully eloquent and texturally emotive while also intentionally ambivalent and often deliberately perturbing. As such the 'unconscious thetic' latently reveals itself to an enquiring viewer at the threshold of meaning (www.karenheald.co.uk/).

 

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