Karen Baldner
Mine (Feet)

Media: Handmade paper casts with embedded hair

Artist Statement:
Mine (Feet), is an exploration of the vulnerability yet strength of my body in the process of encountering what surrounds it. The handmade paper cast for me is both a protective skin and a surface that has suffered some adversity and use. The skin becomes akin to shoes that have become intimate participants to life. They have to occasionally be hung up to dry and recover yet are resilient enough to spring back to shape. In this time of uncertainty and challenge the skin around my body is a reverberation of what goes on outside it as well as beneath it: it protects and it invites, it sometimes suffers and it regenerates itself. 

The paper I made for the cast of my own feet was extremely fragile in the effort to stretch what can form a cast and where it reaches its limits. Hair and Abaca form just enough resilience to hold together and create a fragile sheath around my feet. Nevertheless the sheath is faithful to my very particular foot shape. There was comfort in wrapping these wet and unpredictable materials around my feet and feeling them dry on my skin. And – as always – there was something humbling in not knowing what the fibers would do as I had to surrender to them working in their own mysterious ways. This surrender is the same process I find myself in right now as I am yielding to large forces outside of my control. 

Biography

Karen Baldner grew up in Germany in a Jewish family who survived persecution by Nazi Germany. The haunted climate of Germany after the Holocaust became a pivotal experience and narrative for her work. Karen completed her formal studies in the US with a Masters Degree in Printmaking at Indiana University, Bloomington. Her work has been supported by state grants from Arkansas and Indiana, Fulbright and NEA grants, and is represented by Booklyn, Central Booking NY and Vamp & Tramp Booksellers. She shows extensively throughout the US and Europe and her work is in a number of public and private collections in the US, Canada and Germany. Karen teaches Book Arts, Letterpress and Papermaking at Herron School of Art & Design at IUPUI, Indianapolis, where she directs the Book Arts program.