K3 is my workshop, studio and gallery.  Here my art is created; thoughts are thought, and strokes struck..  Where both physical and mental travel, inspire and shape my art from thought to paper.  .  On my physical journeys, I gather knowledge, empirics and notes through the encounter with other people.  I observe, listen and transform everything from impressions to expressions, the conversation, as well as the unspoken words.

I mainly work with pencil, pen, watercolor and digital art, but am also inspired by other and new forms of expression.  This is partly due to my curiosity to the material, but also due to pain in my body in relation to working positions.

I do digital art, for example, because of my disability.  I usually work in small formats as I cannot lift my arms.  My drawings or paintings made by hand are therefore most often under A4, and rarely above A2 format.

 With digital art, I can ideally unfold on a very small workspace.  Later I get the finished work printed out on nice paper, in a larger format.  My digital art is created in the same way as if I were drawing or painting.  The paper or canvas is simply replaced with a screen. 

My academic background is with great interest in drawing. 

In internship as a city planner, drawing at folk high school, a myriad of croquis courses, and with watercolor and oil painting studies at Aarhus Art Academy. 

With my repeated crosshatching pen strokes; I work with contemporary realism, which is created in an almost meditative process.

I am interested in body language, the vulnerable and the ambiguous.

I work with topics such as identity and humanism.  Lived my life as a wheelchair user;  am not only in today’s Denmark, but in the global modern society, labeled a minority group.  Based on this, narratives are seen of being defined, limited, affected, or alienated as an individual.  The narrative portraits or figures dominate my art.

In addition, my wheelchair fills so much mentally that just an ordinary conversation can be difficult as people associate the wheelchair with a concept they have a hard time embracing.

This further arouses my curiosity about the thought behind the word in relation to people’s general conversation and body language.

---

2020 © Kirsten K. Kester