Karen Stamper’s recent Salvage Series is a move into abstraction, a new stage of her collage paintings that is rooted in her previous work.

Stamper begins in a spontaneous way, mark making from observation; collaging and drawing in sketchbooks. She spends many hours deliberating over arrangements of found and painted paper shapes, edges and surfaces. The act of layering, cutting, distressing, dissembling is integral to each composition’s character and personality.

Stamper combines found papers with layers of painted paper and water-based paint to create an integrated surface. As her work has developed it has become increasingly physical, moving from paper to wooden panels. This is constructed and deconstructed many times; scratched, sanded, repainted, recut, until a patchwork of urban marks and worn surfaces bond together and a sense of unity and design develops. Through Stamper’s process of inquiry, the surface that lies beneath that reveals its own story.