Exercise 4: Write and discuss with your peers
I will consider how my Practice Statement reflects my current position, process, concerns and intentions. The study notes suggest aiming for around 500 words for a Practice Statement.
I looked at writing shorter statements after I wanted to submit work for an open call. Here is a statement about my current work, but not longer than 120 words:
Karen Stander, an artist from the Riebeek Valley, South Africa, explores motherhood, care, grief, and resilience through Hotel Kalahari. Inspired by the intricate nests of sociable weaver birds, her huge wire sculpture installation balance protection and constraint, echoing human vulnerability and nature’s resilience. These nests are more than physical structures—they symbolize the human capacity to weave hope and tenderness from life’s challenges. By suspending the nests, Stander invites viewers to interact and reflect on themes of community, belonging, and care. Her work asks how to reclaim spaces and materials, creating meaning from loss and imbuing them with connection. Hotel Kalahari highlights the interconnectedness of life and the importance of creating spaces of safety and connection.
Here is a version of 150 words:
Karen Stander’s Hotel Kalahari explores the intricate relationships between community, care, and resilience. Inspired by the communal nests of sociable weaver birds, Stander’s hanging wire sculptures reflect the delicate balance between protection and vulnerability. These meticulously crafted nests evoke the shared labour and interconnectedness essential to building natural and human communities.
Stander’s work is rooted in personal storytelling and reflects her grief, care, and healing journey. Each loop of wire symbolises resilience, embodying the repetitive, meditative process of weaving physical and emotional connections. The suspended structures invite viewers to engage with themes of home and belonging while light and shadow transform the sculptures into dynamic, ever-shifting environments.
By connecting the human experience with the resilience of nature, Hotel Kalahari serves as a metaphor for the fragile yet enduring spaces we inhabit and share—reminding us of the power of community to sustain and protect.
Then, there was more thinking about the material, wire and how I could explore this:
In my practice, wire serves as both a material and a metaphor—a vessel for navigating the intersections of personal grief, historical narratives, and collective resilience. This seemingly rigid medium, historically associated with control and division, becomes my work’s reclamation and transformation tool. I look at these vast, sociable weaver nests as a story about the resilience of nature and what I can learn from this. These immense structures built by sociable weaver birds in the arid parts of Southern Africa allowed me to understand how they fit into the ecosystem and made me aware of their ability to engineer around co-existence or communal living in nature.
The wire nests I create are inspired by the sociable weaver birds, whose intricate, communal structures represent resilience and care. These forms invite viewers to reflect on the delicate balance between protection and confinement, belonging and displacement. Yet for me, the act of weaving wire is also profoundly personal—a way of processing the loss of my youngest son to depression, an illness that reflects the deep vulnerabilities of our time. Each loop of wire is a moment of care, a gesture of resilience, and a response to vulnerability.
While my work draws deeply from personal experiences, it also engages with the broader history of the material itself. Wire, a product of the industrial and colonial past, carries a legacy of boundaries and exclusion. In reclaiming it, I seek not to erase this history but to reimagine its possibilities. Through this act of transformation, I hope to inspire questions about how we navigate and reshape the narratives of our lives. It is as if the wire became evidence of what I have learned from the nests through its tactility: its twists, tensions and resilience, which mimic the organic forms of nests and ecosystems. This allowed me to reveal the interplay of individual and collective efforts. It is also seen in the building process – how they move to gather, arrange and shape a nest.
At its core, my practice asks: How do we reclaim spaces and materials, imbue them with care and connection, and create meaning from loss? My nests are not just physical structures but symbols of resilience—testaments to the human capacity to weave something tender and hopeful even from the most challenging materials.
I then wrote the statement to share with peers/friends (500w)
Karen Stander makes big wire nests as she explores the intersections of care, resilience, and the personal and historical narratives embedded in materials. Working from her studio in the Riebeek Valley, South Africa, her work reflects deeply on the human condition, community, and our shared connection to nature. Through intricate wire sculptures inspired by sociable weaver birds’ nests, Stander addresses themes of belonging, vulnerability, and the delicate balance between protection and constraint.
Whether by birds or humans, nest-making is a universal act of care, resilience, and survival. The sociable weaver birds’ massive communal nests, which inspire Stander’s work, are feats of collective engineering, providing shelter and security in the harsh conditions of the Kalahari Desert. Yet, the material she employs—industrial steel wire—carries a complex and contrasting history. This wire, historically used as a tool for control and division through fencing, barriers, and enclosures, is symbolic of systemic inequities, displacement, and historical trauma. In Stander’s hands, the wire is transformed from a containment material into one of connection and creation, embodying a duality of strength and fragility.
Stander’s practice is deeply personal, shaped by her own experiences of loss and grief. After losing her youngest son to depression, the repetitive act of weaving and shaping wire became a way for her to process that grief and find moments of care and reflection amidst vulnerability. The wire’s inherent rigidity contrasts with the tenderness of her intention, underscoring the tension between pain and healing. Each loop of wire is imbued with meaning, becoming a testament to the human capacity to create something hopeful, even from challenging materials and circumstances.
While deeply personal, Stander’s work also resonates with broader societal concerns. The nests serve as metaphors for both ecological and social resilience, reflecting on how communities build spaces of safety and belonging in the face of adversity. At their core, these sculptures invite viewers to reconsider the materials and narratives that shape their lives. What stories do these materials carry? How do we reclaim spaces, objects, and experiences to create connections and care?
The physicality of her practice, working with wire’s sharp edges and strength, reflects the laborious and meditative process of art-making itself. This transformation of a material historically tied to control into something symbolic of care creates a layered conversation. The nests, with their transparent yet intricate forms, embody the tension between protection and vulnerability, survival and fragility, division and unity.
Stander’s work doesn’t shy away from contemporary challenges, including mental health crises and modern society’s disconnection. Through her art, she encourages viewers to reflect on their shared humanity and the interconnectedness of life. The suspended wire nests are not just objects of beauty but spaces for contemplation, inviting interaction and offering a moment of pause.
By reclaiming wire as a material of care and resilience, Karen Stander’s work speaks to the need to create physical and metaphorical spaces that foster safety, connection, and hope. Her practice ultimately highlights the power of art to transform, disrupt, and heal, encouraging dialogue and reimagining narratives of the past and present.
FEEDBACK
Annette: Shared positive feedback on my intentions being clear. She suggested I write about the physicality of how wire feels when working with it and that I have an assistant/help to stress the communal aspect. She suggested I also consider writing about the relationship between the materials of the sociable weavers and wire That’s a great idea! I have a lovely video where I could touch a nest, as a piece had been found on the ground due to a branch of the tree which broke.
Ansie: She left a WhatsApp message urging me to add my personal experience of making as part of my healing process. She had also lost a son more than 15 years ago. We talked about Prof Thomson’s discussion of the context in the nest—how snakes come to raid the nest, the chaos it leaves the birds with, and almost connecting that to the feeling of losing a child when you feel responsible for caring for and supporting life.
Cecile: She sent a WhatsApp message and replied that she felt the reading was easy and understandable – mentioned she expected it would be difficult to read. She admitted she expected ‘high artsy language’ and was pleasantly surprised by the writing style. She suggested I consider writing about the role of shadow and light in my work – to her, this is an added layer about how our emotions fluctuate and we go through different stages. This made me think if I could say that the works invite viewers to explore the dualities within themselves—light and dark, surface and depth, joy and sorrow. By doing so, the work transcends its physical form and becomes a powerful metaphor for the human condition.
During this time, a shift around materials and the space I worked with became clear to me
I wanted to continue working with wire and explore big-scale installation work. I had a story to share. The shift concerned ideas around art as a practice and art as an experience. From the onset, the course material asked me to look inward and for relationships outside, with audiences and the art community, and develop a sustainable studio practice. I realised that with ideas around the nest and making it, I was perceiving nature, but the outcome did not resemble nature as it appears in reality. I shared an experience, a history with material and thoughts.
Wire, as a material, is laden with a practical and symbolic history. Its origins in industrial processes and its use in creating boundaries—fences, enclosures, and barriers—tie it to narratives of control, division, and exploitation. These associations reflect societal struggles such as displacement, systemic inequities, and colonial domination. Yet, in reclaiming wire as a medium for artistic expression, this history becomes a site of transformation. It shifts from a constraint tool to a conduit for connection and care.
I repurpose industrial wire to create intricate, layered sculptures that resonate with themes of resilience and vulnerability. I am confident that I responded to the idea of ‘curare’ and that the place, the agency, offered a space to connect and have purposeful conversations and encounters. The barn, an icon of rural life and collective work, is a fitting counterpoint to this material. It evokes a history of shelter, sustenance, and shared labour—a space where narratives of survival and community have always unfolded. Together, the wire and the barn symbolise a tension between the imposed and the reclaimed, the industrial and the intimate. This dialogue between material and space embodies the act of reclaiming narratives. By reworking wire into nests, I invite viewers to reconsider its historical associations. The delicate yet resilient nests represent the potential to weave new meanings into old materials. They are spaces of care and connection, countering the wire’s original purpose with a tender, human-centred approach. Reclaiming narratives is not only about material transformation but also about reimagining histories. The barn, once a functional space of labour, becomes a gallery of reflection. The wire symbolises industrial might and becomes a medium of vulnerability and healing. Together, they challenge us to think about how objects and spaces carry stories—and how we might rewrite those stories to foster belonging and resilience.
This approach reflects a broader commitment in my work: to acknowledge the weight of history while also envisioning a future shaped by care, creativity, and connection. It is a practice of both remembrance and reimagination, a way of reclaiming the narratives that define us and finding new ways to hold them.
PRACTICE STATEMENT (500w)
Karen Stander creates large-scale, suspended sculptures from woven wire, forming immersive spaces that evoke the structure and symbolism of nests. From her studio in the Riebeek Valley, South Africa, she draws inspiration from the intricate communal nests of sociable weaver birds. Her works explore themes of belonging, vulnerability, and the delicate balance between protection and constraint, while simultaneously reflecting on the human condition and our interconnectedness with nature.
At its core, Stander’s practice asks: How do we reclaim spaces and materials, imbue them with care and connection, and create meaning from loss? Her nests are not just physical structures but symbols of resilience—testaments to the human capacity to weave something tender and hopeful even from the most challenging materials.
The monumental scale of Stander’s sculptures reimagines the nest as more than a symbol of domesticity—it becomes an abstraction and a site of reflection. Her works transform exhibition spaces into heterotopias, a concept drawn from Michel Foucault, where ordinary environments are disrupted to create spaces that question societal norms and boundaries. By situating her nests in unconventional settings, such as barns or outdoor landscapes, she challenges traditional gallery conventions. These site-specific installations encourage dialogue between the work, the space, and its audience, fostering a deeper engagement with the themes of community, care, and survival.
Sociable weaver nests, celebrated for their collective ingenuity in the unforgiving Kalahari Desert, serve as both an inspiration and a metaphor in Stander’s work. Her sculptures echo the communal resilience of these nests while using industrial steel wire, a material historically associated with division, containment, and control. Through repetitive acts of weaving and shaping, she subverts these associations, transforming the wire into a medium of connection and care. This tension between the wire’s historical function and its newfound role in her work amplifies the duality of strength and fragility, protection and vulnerability.
Following the loss of her youngest son to depression, Stander turned to the meditative act of weaving as a means of processing grief. Each loop of wire represents care, intention, and resilience, transforming pain into a visual language of hope and regeneration. The resulting sculptures—simultaneously fragile and robust—become metaphors for survival and interconnectedness, reflecting the human capacity to nurture and endure even in the face of loss.
The transparency of her nests invites viewers to peer into and through them, creating layered interactions with light and shadow that extend their meaning beyond physical form. The shifting patterns of shadow evoke ephemerality and transformation, challenging static notions of space and reinforcing the heterotopic quality of her installations. These elements encourage audiences to reconsider their relationship with space, materials, and community.
Recent projects highlight Stander’s commitment to bridging personal expression with collective engagement. Interactive workshops with NGOs and outdoor installations, such as a monumental steel wing, emphasize the role of community in her practice. Feedback from audiences navigating themes of loss, care, and resilience reveals the transformative potential of her work to foster shared reflections and healing.
Through her practice, Karen Stander reclaims narratives of care and resilience. Her wire nests transcend traditional sculpture, creating spaces for dialogue, healing, and contemplation. By engaging deeply with ideas of scale, material history, and space, she invites audiences to explore the connections between human and non-human worlds, personal and collective stories, and fragility and strength.
Exercise 5: Review and Update your CV
Personal Detail
Karen Stander
Langvlei Farm, Riebeek West, Western Cape, South Africa
Instagram Handle: @karen.standerart
Website: www.karenstanderart.com and www.karenstanderart.co.za
Cellular nu: 063 6048752
Profile
I am interested in connectedness, resilience, and care. I feel strongly about community work and help as a facilitator at a local art-based NGO focused on young children.
Education
1987 BA Social Work University of Stellenbosch, South Africa
2024 Final year in Fine Arts Honneurs Open College of the Arts, London, UK
Exhibitions
2024: Hotel Kalahari – final project for studies at OCA October 2024
2024: Breathe, Breeze and Winged Things at Solo Studios – collaborated with RASA, a Belgian NGO
2023 Art Unlocked, Riebeek Valley group exhibition 22/04 – 23/04
2022 Wander Wide Web Online Kunstmatrix Echitibion with OCA EU student group 30/06/2022 to 30/09/2022
Awards
2020. Dubai International Art Centre First Price for DIAC Year of Tolerance and won a two-week Residency at Liwa Art Hub, Liwa Dessert, Abu Dhabi
Professional and Student Organisations
OCA Region Europe leadership for social media 2022 – 2024
OCA Region Europe member
ART Connect
Artist Information Company