Artist Statement

Karen Hansen (Daniels)

Clan MacLaren, Clan Anderson, Clan Wilson, Clan MacDonald, Scotland.

Tainui - Ngati Wairere (Waikato), by marriage.

Karen is a multidisciplinary artist based in Rotorua whose practice explores the living intelligence of the natural world and the ancient relationship between humanity, land and spirit. Working across assemblage, bas-relief, natural pigmentation, eco dyed textiles, ritual adornment and embodied live works, she approaches art as an alchemical process where materials are activated through direct communion with place.

Gathered plants, minerals, feathers and found organic forms become vessels of energetics and memory rather than symbolic representations. Through a process grounded in animistic cosmology, Hansen creates works that emerge from witnessing, reverence and relational exchange with land and sky. Her work invites viewers to remember older ways of knowing where the body is a sacred site, creativity is a form of prayer and nature is a sentient collaborator.

This practice is informed by lived ritual, ancestral inquiry, ecological materiality and a lifelong commitment to transformation through creative embodiment

Hansen’s current body of work, Susurrus, engages with the energetic topography of Rotorua’s volcanic landscapes and examines the threshold between human consciousness and the animistic cosmos.