ART360: Kara Marshall

Kara Marshall lives and works in England. She is a mixed media artist working predominantly in watercolor, as well as acrylic and textile. Her shooting star artistic career had its genesis during covid lockdown, during which she started tufting and creating and selling textile pieces. This creative pursuit evolved into a practice that has become known at Tuft Luck Studio.

The predominant theme in Kara’s work is the wild west, from cowboys, to boots, stars and horses - one historically impregnated with aesthetic and conceptual lore and mythologies, with brooding masculine bravado taking center stage, popularized by pulp fiction, Hollywood, the Marlboro man. In the hands of Kara however, the trope is examined for an alternative perspective. There is a hedonistic free form to her cowboys, who are softer and more feminine, imaginative, playful, and joyous. Gone are the stiff scowles and the isolated figure in a vast and inhospitable landscape and instead we find forms full of movement and swag, style, pattern and color.

No longer framed by a barren wasteland, their personalities take up the full page. By decontextualizing them in this way, Marshall makes room for unbound possibilities and placements - they inhabit a timeless space that manifests in mood rather than place, allowing them to dance on into any and all sunsets.

Marshall’s work will be displayed at PORTA through November. Please contact info@porta-nyc.com for availability and pricelist.

ART360 is an ongoing series in our 360 Atlantic Avenue space that showcases the work of artists that we love and want to celebrate. Informed by the past, speaking to the future and placing you in the present, art in your home is more than decoration - it frames and reflects who you are within that. Through ART360 we are excited to present artists that have both the aesthetic strength and the conceptual depth to ground their work in continued relevance and ongoing interest.