Karri Paul is an artist and writer living in Los Angeles. Her paintings bring together parts of books, scraps of wood, and pieces of other artworks. Throughout the process of building, painting, taking apart, rebuilding, and repainting, she responds to the words, images, formal elements, and meanings that the materials themselves bring with them. Each finished piece feels stable yet shifting, balanced yet energized, deliberate yet spontaneous. It reveals its own history of being made — the drama of coming into being. The intimate scale suggests the book as a physical object while compositions, color relationships, and illusionistic elements often refer to architecture and landscape.
Karri thinks the same way about her ceramic work, which combines wheel-throwing, hand-building, and printmaking methods to play with ruffles and twists, contortion and collapse, whimsical pattern and surface nuance. Functional elements mingle with sculptural, figural, and sometimes textual references.
Selected exhibitions: The Park School Gallery (Baltimore), LA/LB (Long Beach, CA), Galerie C.O.A. (Montreal), Rørvig Contemporary (virtual—Denmark), Roberts Projects (virtual—Los Angeles), ICOSA Collective (Austin, Texas), Tiger Trikes Asteroid (Los Angeles), Cerritos Art Gallery (Cerritos College, California), L.A.C.E. Benefit (Los Angeles), and Greenleaf Gallery (Whittier College, California).
Selected publications: Boston Review, Fence, The Pushcart Prize, The University of Texas Courtyard Gallery, Yew. Hunger Prospect, a collection of poems, is available from Dancing Girl Press. Read a couple of Karri’s recent poems in Objects in This Mirror: An Anthology of Legacy honoring uber-epic and icono-legendary poetry professor Dr. Richard Jackson.
Born in Wisconsin and raised in Tennessee, Karri Paul earned an MFA at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, a Graduate Certificate from the UI Center for the Book, and an MFA in Studio Art at the University of Texas at Austin. For sixteen years, she taught art, writing, book arts, visual culture, and cross-disciplinary courses at various institutions including MICA, Johns Hopkins, and most recently, Otis College of Art and Design. Now she makes things full time.