KAREN KLINEDINST

About the Artist

Karen Klinedinst is an artist using photography to explore themes of place, nature and the environment. She is a graduate of the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in Baltimore. Her landscapes and botanicals have been exhibited widely, including: Massoni Art Gallery, Fleckenstein Gallery, Y:Art Gallery, Adkins Arboretum, Maryland Art Place, Soho Photo Gallery, The Center for Fine Art Photography, Griffin Museum of Photography, Washington County Museum of Fine Arts, Biggs Museum of American Art, and the Fort Wayne Museum of Art. Her work is in the collection of the National Park Service and the Fort Wayne Museum of Art. She was a 2004 Platte Clove artist-in-residence at the Catskills Center for Conservation and Development, and a 2006 National Park Service artist-in-residence at Acadia National Park in Maine. In 2015, was awarded an Individual Artist Award from the Maryland State Arts Council.

Artist's Statement

In 1972, my grandfather wrote the sonnet So Say The Snowdrops in memory of my grandmother Mary Geib Grace. Fifty years later, this same sonnet was read at my husband’s memorial following his death from pancreatic cancer. Inspired by my grandfather’s sonnet, I created a series of lumens from snowdrops that I found on my daily walks this February as I process my grief and navigate my new life. Using the lumen process, I arranged the foraged snowdrops on ILFORD Warmtone photo paper and then exposed the paper outdoors in changing weather and lighting conditions. This process is full of surprises and serendipity, and a meditation on the beauty of impermanence. SO SAY THE SNOWDROPS by Dorman John Grace White snowdrops, flower children of the snow,  Mute messengers of nature's quickening,  At winter's last pronounce that it is so,  Frail beauty, dead last year, will live in spring. Their upward thrust has split the granite of  still frozen ground, and unbelieving eyes  See how, impossibly, they rise above Remaining snow, to our complete surprise. They say our loves lie buried not too deep  Beneath the frigid dirt's too solid state  To waken from the winter of their sleep,  The earth's resistant skin to penetrate. It cannot be our dead are only dust,  So say the snowdrops, peeping through the crust.