The stages of a woman's life.
When Karen had the idea for this piece, she called her friend who managed the Petersham Gallery and asked if she had room for her in 9 months. She did. Karen gave herself one month to complete each panel. The more you look at this work, the more you see. Every pixel of every panel has deep meaning. You could look at this for decades (I have) and still find things you missed (I did while putting this page together).
A baby is born knowing its parents’ voices and showing a preference for the language spoken by its mother. "Anna used to get the hiccups inside me and jumped when a loud crash happened in a restaurant kitchen where I was working."
Infants don’t know where they end and their mother begins. The father is even more remotely recognized (looking over the mother’s shoulder).
A young child is free in their own skin having not learned concepts like shame. They are also busy learning, like a drawn cat trying to emmulate a real cat (bottom left quadrant), and many versions of one word like “flower”.
A young woman identifies herself by what she sees in the mirror. She has idealized notions of love represented by Cupid (bottom left), and Prince Charming being carried (bottom right). Death is not a concern but it’s always lurking.
A pregnant woman loses aspects of her separate identity represented by the lack of arms and legs and half hidden face. Life is growing in her like a vine. There’s a rabbit in the bottom left symbolizing sex and a dairy maid with a cow to the right of her face.
A woman of a certain age sits sewing a quilt made of scraps from all the pieces of her life. A cauldron of soup bubbles to the right and memories circle her head.
At the ending of her life, a woman is literally dancing out of her skin, celebrating a life well lived.
Her arm extends into the white to black spiral which includes skin tone fabrics from all the stages of her life as she lives on in memories of people who knew her then. The center is a Yin/Yang symbol.