Karen Frances Eng is a multidisciplinary artist exploring how meaning accretes through interactions among place, culture, nature, imagination and technology. Her process-led practice begins with embodied observation and chance encounters. She follows unexpected connections as they emerge, working across traditional and emerging media.
Through the Department of Ontological Cartography — an imaginary institution that serves as an evolving framework for her practice — Eng creates protocols for noticing, naming and mapping extraordinary realities layered within the apparently ordinary. She works with attention as a relational act, noting how sustained encounters with place, culture and creature change what humans perceive and how we understand our participation within ecologies.
Eng’s association with GroundWork dates to 2019. She has contributed writing to its website and devised poetry workshops and retreats in response to its exhibitions and in collaboration with the Norfolk Coast Partnership drawing attention to key coastal species. She has also introduced digital art practices to the GroundWork community through demonstrations and workshops in virtual reality and other digital tools.
Beyond the gallery, she has played key roles in town-scale public artworks in King’s Lynn addressing climate change and sustainable futures. The Intergalactic Hanseatic League and MANIFESTO* (with Collusion Cambridge) combined engagement with children and young people, speculative fiction, large-scale projection and interactive technologies to explore how environmental change affects the town and how its future might be collectively imagined.
As a Lynn resident, Eng experiences the Wash “as an immediate, ever-shifting overlay of air, land, water, light, human infrastructure and wild lives”. Her recent GroundWork residency investigated this through facilitating collective mapping with fellow artists, translating bird-migration data into an experience of sound and rhythm, and creating an installation exploring her relationship with the juvenile gulls with whom she shares habitat.
