Karen Prakhoff Rickman is a Perth based contemporary artist. She completed a Master of Creative Arts at Curtin University in 2006. Rickman has exhibited in Perth and Melbourne, been a finalist in numerous art awards and winner of the City of Melville Art Awards 2021 (acquisitive).
Her recent practice explores the idea of the palimpsest landscape as evocation. Monoprinting (unique state prints) is ideally suited to this deliberate overwriting of images with each layer simultaneously creating and denying form. This process is integral to both the aesthetics and meaning of the work – it speaks of memory, time, loss and renewal.
We are inextricably linked with nature and specific aspects of landscapes resonate with our memories and thoughts. Rickman creates her prints in her studio from her photos of landscape fragments divorced from their context, and the memories they evoke. The square format of much of her work echoes that of the traditional Polaroids she initially used for inspiration, now supplemented with iPhone images.
Rickman works on 2 or 3 prints at a time, exploring an idea and creating links through the repetition of elements via ghost prints, mirror images, and torn paper or bark stencils. She draws into or applies ink with rollers, brushes, rags and cotton buds. There is deliberate oscillation between surface and depth; between marks on paper and spatial illusion.