Flights of fancy

“Handling the birds allows me to reanimate their movement and place them in a landscape that tells a story,” she says.

“I like handling my material, especially the birds, stretching the wings, feeling the articulations, hanging them up to see how the wind catches the wings. They are so fragile.

“This one was given to me by a woman in the village,” she says. “When I got it, it was very fresh and very bright and I decided to make this spring picture.”

Yellowhammer Spring is the result – the songbird is set against the backdrop of a carpet of wild garlic in Letah Wood, thought to be Northumberland’s last wild daffodil wood, which lies just outside of Hexham.

In another picture, a blackbird swoops over the supine frame of a bullfinch, the ruddy hue of the unfortunate finch’s breast plumage reflected in the colour of the local burn, Devil’s Water, which Karen has also photographed for this piece. A ghostly sketch of Duke’s Bridge and several feathers make up the montage.

Photographing dead birds may seem a little gruesome to some but for Karen, using them in her work is a form of ‘memento mori’.

For the uninitiated, memento mori artwork is designed to remind the viewer of their mortality and the shortness and fragility of human life, and often features leitmotifs, such as skulls, clocks and extinguished candles.

But Karen’s work is not specific to humans, though that might be a dimension – it is particularly aimed at reminding us of the fragility of nature and humankind’s part in its denigration.

That yellowhammer, for example, was once common to our hedgerows but is now considered to be in decline. In fact, it appears on the British Trust for Ornithology’s Red List of birds of conservation concern.

Her new exhibition, at South Shields’ Customs House, is called Flying Falling and includes images of melting ice caps and birds plummeting to earth, depicted on beautiful hanging scrolls.

“I like the idea of building a landscape with different elements,” she says. “And I really liked the idea of running an intuitive narrative through a long vertical space that you can’t fit into a single point of view.”

Not everyone who has seen them has been enamoured of the use of avian corpses however. “One person at the exhibition, who was a birdwatcher, said he found it macabre,” she says.

“But the pictures aren’t macabre, although they might have elements of decay. I didn’t take it negatively,” she smiles.

Explaining her process, Karen says: “If I find a dead bird in the garden, I want to photograph it. Friends started bringing me birds that they found. I mix them with other imagery of scraps of nature and drawings from sketch books. I then layer these details of nature to bring up issues around loss of species and environmental change.”

Lest anyone suspect there might be an artistic equivalent of ‘Burke and Hare-dom’ going on, let it be known that Karen’s studio in the garden of her home, Holly Hill Cottage, near Slaley, has windows plastered with bird silhouettes to stop them flying into the glass. No way is she a bird killer!

“Why do I find so many dead birds? I garden an acre next to a copse, forest, and moorland, near a nature reserve with varied habitats of wildlife,” she explains.

Karen’s love of photography can be dated back to her early teens when she was given a 35mm film camera. Born in the ‘motor city’ of Detroit, where her father was a Ford engineer, Karen and the family moved to Green Lake, Michigan.

“In high school, I was given a whole second-hand policeman’s camera kit. It was an Argus C33 with a little screw-on lens, three sweet little filters, all in a case, with little soft bags and an old fashioned flash you put bulbs in.”

Karen took a fine art degree and, after a year at the University of Michigan, she crossed the Pond to study at the distinguished Newcastle University fine art department, at the height of sixties ‘cool’ and home to Victor Pasmore and Richard Hamilton.

It was there she met her geologist husband, Joe, who liked hanging out with the arty crowd and happened to be a great friend of Fourstones sculptor Gilbert Ward.

The couple bought Holly Hill 50 years ago as a two-room stone cottage and have transformed it into a beautiful home with an acre of garden.

They have two daughters, Celina and Amy, and six grandsons, aged between two and 17.

On the afternoon of the Courant’s visit, Karen was looking forward to deconstructing a bird’s nest with some of them – videoing the process –then running the film backwards to reconstruct how the bird built it. How’s that as an alternative to soft play?

l Flying Falling is at The Customs House until May 21 and there is a special brunch talk on May 14 from 11am to 1pm. For details visit www.customshouse.co.uk