About
Karen Sewell is a visual artist who works across media including sculpture, installation, photography, painting, sound and light. She lives and works in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, New Zealand. Sewell is interested in the intersection of art with spiritual experience, in particular, human experiences of the *numinous.
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Sewell graduated with a Master of Fine Arts (with Honours) in 2016 from Whitecliffe College of Arts and Design. She was the recipient of the Premier Award in the Waitakere Trust Art Award in 2011, and has been selected as a finalist in awards including The NZ Portrait Awards in 2012, the Wallace Art Awards in 2013, and the Glaister Ennor Graduate Awards in 2016. Karen is the Artist in Residence at the Holy Trinity Cathedral in Parnell, Auckland
Sewells unique offering artistically and professionally is through her creation of innovative artworks (often) in unexpected and alternative exhibition spaces that offer the viewer the potential for an experience of the unseen and unknown. She is pioneering a dialogue between contemporary art, histories of faith and sites of worship, to be re-connected. Photographic artworks have emerged from the immersive space experience. Both the practices of the installation and photographic artworks, work together in combination to achieve the exhibition experience.
View a gallery of works from the up upcoming Luminary Venice exhibition here:
*Numinous speaks to everything within the realm of our experience which cannot be quantified, explained, or contained. Our intuition, and our feeling-states, our connection to the cosmos, and for some a sense of the divine.
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