Karen Coill

Through my assemblages I express my fascination with color, texture, and form, while they in turn, nurture my intrigue with connecting our past to our present. I am drawn to vintage magazines, textiles, grafitti and mid-century advertising graphics and design. The translucency and the frayed edges of aging fabrics, handmade papers and periodicals, creates an almost subliminal allegory beneath the surface compositions. As I veil the imagery, one over the other, the underlying patterns develop a new story, sometimes related, other times not, to the conscious, intended narrative. I work the materials with obsessive and repetitive methods...tearing, gluing, layering, painting, cutting, slicing...as if to wound and heal the skin, as I smooth and wrinkle it, often taking it apart and putting it back together.?The painted, printed and salvaged, when wrapped, layered and distressed, suggest the passage of time and the recollection of memory. My imagery often seems familiar yet peculiar, as if to exist simultaneously, again, in the past and present.

Through my assemblages I express my fascination with color, texture, and form, while they in turn, nurture my intrigue with connecting our past to our present. I am drawn to vintage magazines, textiles, grafitti and mid-century advertising graphics and design. The translucency and the frayed edges of aging fabrics, handmade papers and periodicals, creates an almost subliminal allegory beneath the surface compositions. As I veil the imagery, one over the other, the underlying patterns develop a new story, sometimes related, other times not, to the conscious, intended narrative. I work the materials with obsessive and repetitive methods...tearing, gluing, layering, painting, cutting, slicing...as if to wound and heal the skin, as I smooth and wrinkle it, often taking it apart and putting it back together. The painted, printed and salvaged, when wrapped, layered and distressed, suggest the passage of time and the recollection of memory. My imagery often seems familiar yet peculiar, as if to exist simultaneously, again, in the past and present.