Karla Black is a Scottish artist living in Glasgow. Her work draws from a multiplicity of artistic traditions from expressionist painting, land art performance, to formalism. Her large-scale sculptures incorporate modest everyday substances, along with very traditional art-making materials to create abstract forms. Black chooses her media for their tactile aesthetic appeal: the familiarity of the texture of cellophane or the scent of cosmetics bridges the experience of tangible matter with the intimacy of memory or the subconscious. Black’s process is intensely physical and this energy is conveyed through ‘impromptu’ staging of her work; this suggestion of performance psychologically involves the viewer with the making process, provoking instinctive responses to her precarious assemblages. Black’s work evinces childhood memories of cakes and candy floss, of birthdays and ice cream. It is absorptive, immersive and engaging, painterly and sculptural, ephemeral and yet permanent. It always has a fragile appearance and is often fragile, capable of being destroyed by a draught or the actions of a viewer. It teeters on the edge of being and non being.