Karen Stone: No Place Like Home

Essay by Louise R Mayhew

Flowers bloom within domestic memories: half-formed and half-forgotten. They grew along the long and darkened hallway where I learnt to crawl. They flourished up little legs among the thickly knitted cables of Winter’s navy stockings. And they decorated porcelain tea-cups, too precious for clumsy hands, locked away in Nanna’s antique display cabinet.

Karen Stone’s No place like home conjures such formative memories. Within her delicate textured surfaces, colour palettes of yesteryear and roses writ large, she collapses time and space, transporting us to childhood and another little girl’s memories. Especially evocative is Stone’s distant remembering of hiding behind her grandmother’s lounge, enchanted by the sunlight as it seemed to wake up the fabric-flora. Stone’s oversized flowers—drawn from interior decorations—make Alice-in-Wonderland’s of us all, returning us to our smaller selves when all the world seemed large.

In the studio, Stone’s paper paintings begin as clothing: donated, rescued and found. As Stone knows, clothes are also containers of memory. They hold traces of the places we have been and narratives of the people we once were. Before pulping her collected clothes, Stone slips them on and into the possibilities of who she might be. It’s an imaginative process of fantasy and freedom that threads throughout her practice.

Standing above her silk-screen, painting with her pulped textiles, Stone talks to her works in process. And they talk back. Some of her artwork titles capture snippets of what was said. Childhood reminiscing. Overbearing adults. Delicious treats. Gendered expectations. Rips and Repair. Home ownership. Un/Belonging. Patriarchy. Decorative pasts. And contemporary textiles. All converge in conversation and ripple throughout Stone’s finished works.

In the gallery, Stone’s paper paintings are the culmination of an experimental material process that transforms clothing into art. Her finished works slip between decoration, drawing, paper-making and painting. Falling from the ceiling, and gently swaying with the hint of a breeze, they are simultaneously installation, wallpaper and wall. Moreover, they are exceptionally enticing objects: tender, rendered with precision and care, redolent with nostalgia yet also lined with shadows. Fleshing out the exhibition, Stone provides insights into her creative process, her studio and her home. We encounter her sketch-books, working drawings, piles of clothes and the dripping-water soundtrack of her paper-making.

As you take it all in, I wonder what memories surface for you, of people, places and things? No red shoes can take us there but we can, in our own ways, make new homes here and now.

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