Karen Barbour - Where the Fruits of the Trees are Jewels

This limited edition publication follows the exhibition 'Karen Barbour: Where the Fruits of the Trees are Jewels', which took place at Moon Grove, Manchester between 18 October 2024 and 7 February 2025. The press release to the exhibition read as follows: 'After two solo exhibitions in New York at White Columns in 2022 and Jack Hanley Gallery in 2023, Moon Grove presents Karen Barbour's first solo show in the UK. Comprising twenty-nine paintings on paper that include a new body of work as well as paintings and collages that have been re-visited over the years, it dwells on the California-based artist's intense concern for the spiritual in painting and how it might serve to alter psychological perspectives on landscape, cityscape or our internal relationship with our environment in general. Essentially, Barbour's work can be described as 'visionary', in one respect because her work is imaginative, direct and raw, and in another because she is inspired by her infrequent experience of temporal lobe seizures, a situation she describes as becoming 'stricken with powerfully intense barrages of very accurate memories from my life'. On a wider cultural level her work is deeply connected and informed by US West Coast grass roots creative moments: the tradition of psychedelic illustration and pattern, self-taught artistic communities, and the Bay Area's pioneering history of supported studios for artists with disabilities.