Unpreventable Within

Unpreventable Within is an amorphous, swathe of translucent plastic that drapes across the floor. Coated with baby oil gel and paint that collects in pools in its crevices, it forms a water-like terrain suggestive of a natural landscape. Black chooses her media for their tactile aesthetic appeal. Comprised of modest everyday substances, the familiarity of the texture of cellophane or the scent of cosmetics bridges the experience of tangible matter with the intimacy of memory or the subconscious. The energy of the intensely physical process involved in making the work is conveyed through her works informal staging; this suggestion of performance psychologically involves the viewer with the making process, provoking instinctive responses to her precarious assemblages. With no boundary separating the work and the viewer, Karla Black invites us to engage with the physical, psychological, and theoretical stimuli contained within the work, which relate to art as a wider-world experience.

Karla Blacks work draws from a multiplicity of artistic traditions, from Expressionist painting, Land art, Performance, to Formalism. Her approach to sculpture is holistic and without hierarchy, assembling materials that will appeal to all senses. Absorbing art historical influences such as Joseph Beuys's social sculpture and Eva Hesse's organic minimalism, Black is interested in exploring material experience as a way of thinking, feeling or communicating without language. Encouraging us to communicate through inciting a response to the physical world, Black allows her work to achieve its own communication and agency.