Karen Ulph is well known for her dreamlike abstracts. The beauty is that every time you look you find something new. Landscapes, seascapes, faces, places and animals. The shapes evoke places you’ve been, awake or asleep. They have a feel of somewhere that’s a little of both.

My work is heavily influence by both the places in which I've lived, and those through which I've travelled. I feel deeply grateful to have moved about a fair bit in my life, not just within the UK, but around the world. When I was a child, as a family we moved from Scotland to Australia to England to Canada and then back to England again.

I became infused with various diverse cultures, soaking up folk and fairy tales of all kinds from the places that we traveled. I still have the book of bed time stories from our time in Australia filled with aboriginal tales of animals in the sky creating thunder and lightning.

My fondest memory from Canada when I was eleven is standing in front of a huge wooden totem sculpture of a raven on a clam shell by the famous Inuit artist Bill Reid. I believe this is where my love of all things mystical and magical began. The traveling didn't stop when I became an adult: I spent time in India, Malaysia and the USA. I also returned to Canada for some time. It was fascinating being back in the same place twenty years later, visiting the places I had been as a child was a priceless experience. Traveling through these places as an adult with a little more life experience was wonderful. I love feeling the wildly different landscapes as you travel and how through our connection to them, they shape us.