Karen Kraven

To accept death in the garden and in life, one must endure torrential downpours, drought, uncertainty and yield gaps. Forgetting clock time, the barefoot gardener walks “the long unwinding spiral of rot and fertility,”1 unclogging downspouts and mulching roses for winter.

Karen Kraven is interested in the vulnerability and potential of the body through exertion, work, and grief. Accessing her familial background in fashion and textiles and accumulating the surplus possessions and fabric scraps that drift in the periphery of the body, her work defoliates, lingers, eventually propagating. 

Bloemenlust at Oakville Galleries presents new and recent works by Karen Kraven, whose sculptures and installations navigate the politics of pleasure and pain within the cut-flower industry. These works intertwine themes of illness, grief, and the deceptive allure of redemptive productivity. What does it mean to inhabit a body—under duress, under capitalism? 

Notes Towards the Exhibition

• Bloemenlust draws its name from one of the world’s largest flower auctions, established in 1911 in the Netherlands. 

• The flower trade industry, an emblem of beauty and comfort for lovers, mourners, and celebrants worldwide, masks an unsettling reality tied to its labour practices: in South American factory-gardens, workers endure long hours and hazardous chemical exposure to meet the insatiable demand. Millions of roses are provided by these gardens for Valentine’s day alone. This stark reality echoes the historic rallying cry, "Bread for all, and Roses too!"— a pretty refrain and a fierce argument that more than survival and bodily well-being were needed and was demanded as right.2

• Anthocyanins are pigments found in roses, known for their anti-inflammatory, antioxidant, and antimicrobial properties.

• Aphasia is a neurological disorder that impairs the brain’s ability to comprehend and formulate language. A visual semantic paraphasia, for instance, replaces the target word with a word that shares its visual features, such as umbrella for lampshade.3 There are currently no medications or treatments that can reverse the brain damage caused by vascular dementia. 

• Freud’s revision of the Lustprinzip (the pleasure principle — the instinct to seek pleasure and avoid pain) after the loss of his daughter deepens the discourse on mourning and melancholia. While mourning involves the process of "knowing what one has lost," melancholia reflects the profound experience of "not knowing what one has lost," highlighting the complexities of grief and loss.4

 1. Olivia Laing, The Garden Against Time, Norton & Company, 2024, p.287

2. Rebecca Solnit, Orwell’s Roses, Penguin Books, 2021

3. Paraphasia” (January 8, 2025) In Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paraphasia

4. Judith Butler cited in Beverly Ayling-Smith’s Doctoral Thesis, University of Brighton, September 2016

Karen Kraven is a Canadian artist working with photography, sculpture and installation. Influenced by her father’s (and his father’s) knitting factory, which stopped manufacturing the year that she was born, and by the physical and optical properties of textiles, her practice explores the ways in which clothing registers the body — how the body is unfinished, unstable and like an archive, something that unfolds and changes with time — pointing to the sustained impact of work and wear. 

Recent solo exhibitions have included Le Chiffonier at AXENÉO7 in Gatineau (2022), Hoist at PLATFORM Centre in Winnipeg (2022), Lull at Latitude 53 in Edmonton (2020), Dust Against Dust at Parisian Laundry in Montreal (2019) and Pins & Needles in the Toronto Sculpture Garden (2018). Reviews of Kraven’s work have been published in C Magazine, Canadian Art, Momus and Artforum. Her work was also recently acquired by the Musée d’art Contemporain de Montréal.