ART-TRIBUTE:Weaving and other Practices… Carla Black

We continue our Tribute with Karla Black. Combining traditional artistic materials such as chalk, paper, paint, and plaster with everyday items including eye shadow, earth, ribbon, toilet paper, and cotton wool, Black’s works are at once elaborate and simple, expressive and restrained. They challenge their own medium by being “almost” or “only just” objects with a close affinity to painting, performance art, and installation.

By Dimitris Lempesis

Born in 1972 in Alexandria, U.K., Karla Black received a BFA in sculpture (1999), an MPhil in art in organisational contexts (2000), and an MFA in fine arts (2004), all from Glasgow School of Art. Her sculptures employ everyday substances such as sugar, soap, cellophane, and cosmetics in combination with materials traditionally identified with art making, including paint, paper, and plaster, all of which she generally leaves untransformed and untreated. Black’s work displays a detachment from the social and cultural histories that are sometimes associated with her materials. Instead, she engages the tactile properties of matter in new ways through the creation of large, site-specific, abstract works that push the boundaries of sculpture to the reaches of installation and performance. Black considers relationships among form, color, and aesthetic balance, bringing a painterly sensibility to her process. Despite any references to other mediums, her works, simultaneously fragile and monumental, exist as autonomous sculptural objects that often reveal, through physical traces such as fingerprints and dust, the artist’s hand. Black is concerned with the ways in which a work operates and uses materiality to emphasize a physical relationship to the body as a means to affect our understanding of the world. In “Made to Wait” (2009), a cellophane sheet floats as a nearly invisible screen with a band of paint and residue from common drugstore cosmetics covering its bottom edge. Both elusive and stable, the work is grounded in its materiality as a physical experience and resists any metaphorical or symbolic meaning. Also suspended from the ceiling, “Make Yourself Necessary” (2013) involves sinuous forms of crumpled cellophane dusted with pink paint powder. Remnants of pink dust settled on the floor below suggest the tenuous negotiation between states of breaking down and existing as the section precariously floats in space. In 2011, Black was both nominated for the Turner Prize and represented Scotland at the Venice Biennale.