Karlyn Sutherland

Heller Gallery is pleased to present Articulated Atmospheres, our first full solo exhibition of work by Scottish artist and architect Karlyn Sutherland.

Karlyn Sutherland’s practice focuses on her long-standing interest in the connection between memory and place and a response to the atmosphere created by the play of light and shadow within architectural forms. She explores this dialogue through glass and architecture and uses perspective drawing as a tool to contemplate and communicate feelings of detachment from place and making those experiences material. Currently, Sutherland is on a one-year Fulbright research grant in Corning, New York (through the summer of 2022), developing and exploring an experimental creative strategy capable of aiding the appreciation, understanding and creation of atmospheres of place within architecture.

The exhibition Articulated Atmospheres features ten new works made over the past three years. They are site-specific and place-responsive and fall into two main categories, which track the disruptions imposed on the artist by the pandemic. Some, such as Pilchuck, Autumn 2019 (7) and 11th & Ellsworth, Philadelphia, were started as early as 2019 during a Pilchuck Glass School artist residency, but were only completed in the last nine months at the Corning Studio.

Sutherland’s most recent pieces, called Gradations, include the pink, violet & opalescent triptych Milbrook, Dutchess County and the diptych Onandoga Street, Corning (2) (both 2022), and specifically describe the absence of a distant horizon. That absence, acutely notable to Sutherland, who grew up on the northern coast of Scotland, made her focus on ‘looking upwards’ and prompted her to capture it in a vertical shift looking at how, where & when the sky meets the ground in a landscape devoid of a distant horizon. The Gradation series works, document the mood and colors of the sky light as day & night and seasons change and are perhaps a more direct response to the moves and lockdowns she and all of us have recently experienced.

Finally, the exhibition also includes a dramatic, design-oriented installation using black & white perspective line drawings in glass. It comprises of the eye-befuddling Vertigo 3 table pair and wall panel diptych Vertigo 4.

Karlyn Sutherland holds a PhD in Architecture from the University of Edinburgh (2014). Her work has been the subject of a 2018 solo exhibition at the Toyama Museum of Glass Art, Toyama, Japan, and included in group exhibitions internationally, most notably at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh and the Bornholm Art Museum, Bornholm, Denmark. Sutherland was a 2016 Endeavour Research Fellow at Australian National University, Canberra; the recipient of the 2017 Rakow Commission from Corning Museum of Glass and the winner of the 2019 Craft Scotland Prize for Design and Craftsmanship. Her work is held in the collection of the Corning Museum of Glass.