KAREN DIVINE


Mapping the Collective Unconscious Photographic montage large print Edition 1 of 20 30 x 24 inches KDI 006-G

I see the world in layers, stacking colors and ideas, forms and stories onto each other as if one were walking through their day with blurred vision, not taking in specifics but piecing together various parts and overlapping them, sensing what’s all around us that we sometimes miss when we are caught in our thoughts.

The layers of photographs in my work have been building up for twelve years.  Often I take a previously flattened image and use parts of that piece to begin new work.  Most of my series are visual diaries; “Pondering the Leap” series reflects a decision and transition out of a marriage.   The “Series of Twenty” is about the “red lady”, a woman of passion and strength finding her way through a new life.  The work is rich in symbology, linking one’s spiritual side to the daily mundane affairs and learning to bridge the two, eventually discovering how to live and create from that bridge.  The newest series is the “Making Connection” Series which begins with the image “Finding Her Parts” and proceeds to making the connections between these parts and ending with the “Mapping The Collective Unconscious” piece in which all the players (archetypes) are shown and described.

My work expresses through these forms and textures the subtlety of influences that exist.  It’s photography that represents my personal experience of the world and becomes stories of multiple and personal dimensions.

I first studied photography in Cambridge, MA in the early 70’s after returning from a jaunt as a model in New York City and finding the photographer’s job far more intriguing. Eventually I returned to Atlanta and continued studying painting, woodworking, printmaking and drawing. In the early 90’s I gave birth to three children in Atlanta and eventually moved to the mountains of Colorado. In 2000 I traveled to Santa Fe to study Photoshop at the Santa Fe Workshops and it was the beginning of my current work.

With this program, I was able to create the paintings I imagined by using my photographic images as a palette: pulling colors, textures, subtle forms and text onto a blank page. They no longer belonged to the “classical” photographic world but evolved into an entirely new “painting”. After my first workshop I was published in Popular Photography Digital Issue in 2001 and 2002 and have gone on to win numerous awards both national and international.

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