Art appearing here is Copyrighted by Karin Walland and may not be used or reproduced without written permission from the artist.
View more of Karin's art...
Page 1
Page 2
Page 3
Page 4
Page 5
Edible Postcards & Other Gluten-free Art
(Editor's Note: This interview first appeared on June 21, 2001 in our free
celiac newsletter. If you'd like to subscribe, send an email to celiac@clanthompson.com. The word SUBSCRIBE should appear in the subject line.)
Karin Walland is an experimental artist who lives in Bristol, England. She does amazing things with pinhole photography, glass etchings, and screen printings. Her work is being shown at the Bridgwater Art Center in England, between June 5 - July 7th, 2001. She would like to hear from other celiac artists and they can contact her by emailing KBAWalland@aol.com
CLAN THOMPSON:How has celiac disease influenced your art?
KARIN: I find it very difficult to go to conferences or residential courses because I can't be sure of the food, but CD has begun to influence my art directly because I'm doing more and more food art -- like my edible postcards and my...jellies....It's more to connect memories and food. To me, that's more relevant than to most people because a lot of food is only a memory to me since I can't eat it anymore.
CLAN THOMPSON: Do you limit yourself to only working with gluten-free foods?
KARIN: Yes. I have to because I'm quite sensitive and I don't want to risk ingesting it. I'd rather work with various toxic chemicals than with gluten because I know how to protect myself against toxic chemicals. Although I would like to make things with bread and gluten because of its symbolic value, I'd have to get someone else to make it up for me and my work is very much guided by what happens in the process so it's a very difficult thing to do.
CLAN THOMPSON: How did you come up with the idea for "A Souvenir of the Seaside"- the exhibition that's running in Bridgewater now?
KARIN: The exhibition is a montage based on memories of seaside holidays in the 1950's. I asked myself, 'What makes up a holiday?' and the thing that struck me was how much holiday memories have to do with food and treats.
I started combining things with a tea table...how you can bring memories into it. I was thinking along the lines of things preserved in aspic. They'll last a little bit longer in aspic. I was thinking of things trapped in amber, like insects. It became a combination of memories trapped in a holiday treat...like amber jellies with souveniers trapped in them and because jellies are preserved, they do not go bad. You end up with something like amber with memories trapped...printed photographic images in them. You have distorted photographic images with something you're trying to record so this becomes a sort of tea table -- like you get at a seaside boarding house. There will also be jam jars treated in the same way.
CLAN THOMPSON: Would you tell our readers about your edible postcards?
KARIN: Back to the seaside holiday -- I was thinking of seaside rock (candy) where the name of the holiday town is embeded in the sugar stick and I mentally combined that with the "wish you were here" postcards and came up with the idea of edible postcards made out of...icing. They're quite fragile -- as memories are. I liked the idea, as well, of making an art work that you can eat if you get fed up with it!
CLAN THOMPSON: Have you ever eaten any of your postcards?
KARIN: Fragments! It's just hard icing with screen images printed on them -- and they're strictly gluten-free!
CLAN THOMPSON: How do you make them?
KARIN: It's quite easy to say how I do an individual piece after the event but, because my work is very experimental, I'll then go on to do something else that has nothing to do with the previous expression. I invent techniques as I go along and I very rarely do the same thing twice. I might use an image twice, but each finished work is unique onto itself.
CLAN THOMPSON: Who are your favorite artists?
KARIN: I'm very keen on abstract expressionists. I like the German artist Anselm Kiefer. I like Giacometti. I'm keen on Hockney's photography and reverse perspective.
CLAN THOMPSON: What is your own background in art?
KARIN: I dabbled in art as a child. My father taught me how to draw at a very early age. When I was five years old, I won a local newspaper competition. I've always been interested in the creative area and dabbled in textiles and knitware. Once my nursing career was over (because of injuries) and I started feeling better on the celiac diet, I began toying with the idea of doing an art degree and it really galvanized my ideas -- not so much the actual degree as the serious doing of my art. It helped me recover.
CLAN THOMPSON: What do you hope to accomplish as an artist?
KARIN: I don't think I'll "accomplish" anything because that presuposes that you're working to one goal. My art is more in the nature of a clusterbomb where it starts from one place and goes into different directions and each of those could take on a life of its own. I think every artist wants some sort of recognition for better or for worse, but the aim for me is in the work itself not in the money which I earn very little of or the recognition which I'm not getting very much of either!
CLAN THOMPSON: What are your future plans?
KARIN: A lot of my work is about fragments, layers and sticking things together so I'm always experimenting. At present I'm doing this exhibition on seaside memories and we'll be doing a more extended one next year in a different seaside resort. For the bigger exhibition, I'll be looking at laying material and images going backwards and forwards.
I'm also working on another project that involves prints of pinhole photography which will go into a Web gallery.
Another project I'm working on with Dave is a Resurrection piece which will be a performance involving alternative traditional photographic processes and that piece will be totally sight specific because one of the things that piece is about is light and since the light is different in each place and the performance will differ according to the light in the place where it's performed.
EDITOR'S NOTE: Dave Thompson is a celiac composer who is writing music for Karin's Resurrection piece. Karin's original concept is to place huge undeveloped photographs in the windows of a hall and have music provide a sonic background to the interplay of light and artistic vision as the photographs develop with available natural light.)
