Karen Mayo | Artist & Author

Art-making is a spiritual connection made visible.

Through photography, digital imaging, moving image, ink and installation, I explore states of being, consciousness, presence and the evolution of knowing. My practice emerges from a deeply held understanding of the relationship between the formless and form: how something experienced within the inner world may find expression through the physical act of making.

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There is a place within my creative practice that exists beyond thought, where I become aware of awareness itself. In this stillness, I am not seeking an emotional response or attempting to construct an idea. I am simply present. From this space, an impulse to move may emerge, finding expression through an image, a gesture or an unfolding relationship between forms. What begins without form gradually becomes something visible.

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My spiritual experience, theoretical understanding, artistic knowledge and lived experience have developed alongside one another throughout my life. Each informs the way I perceive, question and create. Years of studying, researching and making have deepened my understanding of representation, perception and the relationship between an artwork and the person who encounters it. These intellectual, experiential, and spiritual dimensions are not separate influences on my practice, but interconnected ways my understanding continues to evolve.

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For many years, I have explored the capacity of photographic and digital images to move beyond representation and become experiences of presence. My earlier installations investigated the human form through observation, participation and the act of looking. Through projection, layered imagery, moving image and audience interaction, the image extended beyond its physical boundaries, entering the space shared with the viewer. The photograph was no longer simply something to be seen, but something to be experienced.

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The spaces in between remain central to this enquiry. Between stillness and movement, visibility and concealment, form and formlessness, I explore the changing relationships through which we experience ourselves and the world. These intervals are not empty spaces, but places of possibility, where perception may shift, recognition may emerge, and something previously unseen may become known.

Within my Evolution series, the human form emerges through overlapping, translucent and shifting bodily states. Compositional relationships informed by the Fibonacci sequence and Golden Ratio, together with the subtle transitions of Leonardo da Vinci's sfumato, contribute to a visual language in which the body is not fixed, but continually becoming. The image holds different moments of existence together, allowing form to emerge, dissolve and reappear within a shared visual space.

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This enquiry extends through The Evolution of Knowing and The Third Presence, where the relationships between figures, states of consciousness and the viewer become central. These works consider how different states of being may coexist within one consciousness, without one necessarily replacing the other. Through proximity, reflection and the encounter with the viewer, the image becomes a space in which another dimension of presence may emerge.

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My ink works return this enquiry to the immediacy of physical gesture. Here, an inner movement finds expression through the relationship between brush, ink, surface and space. The gesture carries something of the experience from which it emerged, allowing the formless to become visible through the movement of making. Across these different media and processes, the underlying spiritual connection remains.

I have come to understand my artworks as signposts.

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Each carries something of my inner world into the visible world, where it becomes available to another human being. I do not seek to prescribe what another person should see, feel or understand. Rather, I offer something of what I have come to know, with the possibility that another may recognise something already present within themselves.

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I believe every human being has an inner light—an inherent spiritual presence that I understand as our higher self, the divine essence of who we truly are. Beneath the movement of thought, emotion, and the changing circumstances of our lives exists the possibility of connecting with this deeper consciousness and state of being.

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My art emerges from my own experience of this connection. Through the act of making, something of that inner awareness finds expression in visible form. When the artwork enters the world, it becomes available to others, not as an explanation of what they should believe or experience, but as an invitation to encounter something within themselves.

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I do not believe the artwork creates this awareness. Rather, I believe it may offer a moment of recognition—a space in which something already present within us becomes conscious, even briefly.

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For me, this is art's purpose: to bring something of the formless into form, to give presence to what has been experienced and understood, and to share that understanding with others.

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My artworks are expressions of my own journey of remembering, offered as signposts along the journeys of others.