Kari is an artist who loves to explore the landscapes near her home, foraging for unusual and interesting botanicals.
Originally from Ireland, Kari now lives and works in Tasmania, and her new work emerges from the influence of her new home. It is full of different fauna and flora, wild landscapes and coastal beaches. It is infinitely interesting and fascinating.
Kari has just become a new casual stallholder at Salamanca Market, which allows her to share her story with a wider audience. The works she creates for the market are no less special than her award-winning, larger scale gallery pieces, but because they are smaller and have a direct link to our island’s sense of place, they feel infinitely more precious.
"I go to different locations and collect natural botanicals, seaweeds and barks that I find and then bring them back to my studio," Kari says.
"I process them into different pigments, inks and paints and use these to create art that responds to the place the materials come from. It’s a really beautiful way of capturing the essence of an environment, using sustainable and eco-processes.
"It’s a way for me to understand the landscapes I spend time in and that I travel through," she says.
Kari holds a cluster of her beautiful artworks created from banksia, charred bone and dandelion.
Colour and chemistry
"Wrack is a type of seaweed that can be found on some of the beaches here," says Kari.
"I turned it into an ink and you can see the colour the ink creates on the paper. You can modify the colour by adding iron to it, that then oxidises and darkens the colour. You can stretch the spectrum by changing the pH level, or adding different modifiers to it."
It’s a lesson in colour and chemistry on paper. Her hand moves to a sheet of thick watercolour paper with various ochre, brown and grey colors spread across it.
"Here we have dandelion, which is a beautiful yellow ochre color. You get a lovely green from it when it’s modified. This is from the Coal River Valley, where I live.
"I also have some charred banksia cone. I found it at Clifton Beach and that makes a really beautiful charcoal colour. I use it as a paint, so I crush it down into a pigment, add a binder, and then use a muller to turn it into a creamy paint.
"I also make charred bone black, which is a much browner black, where the banksia is a much bluer grey. I really like to be able to see the subtlety of tone."
Although some items are ground down and mixed with a binder such as gum Arabic, other colours are extracted in a gentler way and left to seep in water. If it’s a metal, like copper, it can be left to corrode and turn a vivid majestic blue. Other processes include boiling down botanicals such as seaweed, where they turn into a dye bath and can then be reduced to an ink.
"A big part of my practice involves foraging," says Kari.
"Typically, I will use any excuse to get out into nature to explore the environment. I always have a few little tote bags ready to collect different materials. I love the east coast and southern coast of Tasmania and I also collect a lot from the Coal River Valley. I particularly love South Arm, including Clifton Beach, Gellibrand Point and I love Seven Mile Beach. For me the foraging is a lovely way of accessing the landscape, having something to do, and a way of moving through it.
"It’s a way of understanding where I am in the world and bringing that back into the studio and putting it through the processes of my practices, and then all of these colours emerge. Sometimes they will mirror how they do in the natural environment and sometimes they won’t, they’ll produce completely new colours and that’s the really exciting part of my practice. I don’t necessarily know what colours I am going to get.
"And so when the colours do emerge, the second part of the process is creating artworks that respond to the place. I draw on how I felt when I was foraging and how I felt when I was being blown around by the wind, or next to the crashing waves, and encompassing that into the energy of the paintings I create."
Kari Cahill Studio can be found at Salamanca Market as a casual stallholder. To check which weekends she will be there visit the weekly trading schedule on the Salamanca Market website.
For more information and to see more of her work visit her website or her Instagram page.
Gallery
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