We’re delighted to announce the project by Karen David, the sixth invited artist in our IN HOUSE series of collaborations between the House of Sarah Baker and artists, illustrators and designers. IN HOUSE invites visual creatives to take over the brand's Instagram channel with their personal, bespoke responses to our fragrances.

Text written by IN HOUSE curator, Ken Pratt

KAREN DAVID'S IN HOUSE WORKS FOR SARAH BAKER

Karen David is a London-based artist, writer and lecturer. Her project for IN HOUSE relates directly to her current ongoing series using piped oil paints. Always interested in popular cultural movements, her current body of work takes its starting point from the massive international subculture of cake decoration as played out online—and the more general fever-pitched craze for baking that his risen to global media prominence during the last decade—to explore the intersections with traditional painting and this craft. David creates these works using oil paints, but with the piping bag and nozzle tools used by enthusiastic cake decorators. 

Sometimes these works have an iteration more akin to a painting, at others, clearly within the realms of sculpture—most curators would argue that all are a form of sculpture, her work bearing a strong lineage to a Greenbergian tendence that demanded we consider the materiality of paint, whether in the works of Van Gogh, Frank Stella, or Cecily Brown. As with these earlier reconsiderations of painting that broke painting’s equivalent of “the fourth wall” in theatre, we cannot pretend that a painting is two-dimensional in any scientific sense in these works. 

It’s also entirely fitting that Karen’s choice has been to focus on the three fragrances from the house’s Peach Trilogy.

In perfumery, the term “gourmand” is a relatively new invention; a term referring to fragrances that include notes that we more readily associate with food; chocolate, coffee, caramel, etc. But, it can equally be argued that many of the fragrances that wouldn’t ordinarily be classified as gourmands by perfumers contain notes of things that are eaten as often as they are smelled, whether peach, cardamom, walnuts, ginger, vanilla or any number of citrus fruits. 

This makes complete sense in bioscience terms. Smell and taste are inextricably linked. Our digestive systems kick into action when we first smell the food that we later taste. Interestingly, this is not unknown within the industry with many of the leading professional resources devoted equally to the sciences of scent and flavourings. 

The fragrances Karen has selected all have to do with both scent and flavour, a fitting circularity for works that reference cake decoration in oil paint. 

Here, actual oil paint passes for the seductive sweet promise of a decorative frosting we might find on a sumptuous treat for both our appetites for both smell and flavour. The address the nose and the tastebuds, visually at least. But, beyond the kneejerk reaction of these seeming to be something you might literally want to eat, there are other artistic considerations at play.

Part of the unique DNA of Sarah Baker Perfumes is to approach fragrance as storytelling. Each of the fragrances has a story behind it, a scented tale, encapsulated in the mini-film scripts by Sarah Baker Studios included in each box. 

Consciously or intuitively, Karen David’s work intersects with the themes in these stories for the fragrances on which she has focussed. The work for Rococo Pie takes the form of an elaborate wig, straight out of the story of Cassanova’s 18th-century Venice, complete with an erotic feast for illicit lovers that inspired it. The work for Pastel Rumours alludes to the gelati or delicious decorated pastries one might find in the local café that features briefly in the story, dripping in the 80s colours of Italian postmodern design. 

As with the stories behind these fragrances, there is always an artifice and a little twist in the tale. This is mirrored in Karen David’s work where we appear to be dealing with the delights of a seductively sugary icing, but we are in fact looking at oil paint. And again, another layer of flickering suggestion. In the Middle Ages, our very tradition of Western painting used edible materials to develop paint, first tempura (egg) and later oil paint made from both edible and inedible materials. Perhaps, as animals, this explains our attraction to oil paint. Maybe it is hardwired: we literally want to eat it though rational knowledge means the cognoscenti knows that some of it contains poisonous ingredients. This brings it even closer to home with works for Peaches Revenge, where overreaching greed and desire overriding caution is something the one exacting revenge may rely upon.

MORE ABOUT KAREN DAVID'S WORK

As an artist, Karen David has an eclectic practice that has embraced a range of media from painting and ceramics to resistant media and marbling on paper. There are, however, a few things that run through her body of work: popular culture, myth and craft. And, they are usually explored as an intersection, taking her time to focus on the questions and discussions raised rather than jumping from one topic to the next.

(above: Karen David's installation at the Institute for Contemporary Art (ICA), London, "Bloomberg New Contemporaries," 2024)

Pop culture is often a starting point, David being naturally drawn to it and curious about what it conveys. This is seen in her earlier long-running series that uses the leitmotif taken from the hit TV series The X Files (1993-2018), namely the iconic poster featuring a poster with an image of an alleged UFO and the words “I want to believe” that appeared on the office wall of one of the lead protagonists. For nearly a decade, this poster was replicated and shared from the earliest days of mass Internet culture, a shorthand cipher for many ideas. It is arguably one of the seminal examples of a meme as explained by cultural theorists addressing Internet culture (after lifting the term from British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins), long before its populist usage conflation that focuses only on the replication (“viral”) rather than intrinsically embedded codes of meaning.

(above: Karen David presenting at Bloomberg New Contemporaries Live at the ICA, London, 2024)

However, Karen David’s reworking of this image often looked to craft, embroidery, for example. The intersection between this pop culture iconic image and craft of the kind generally considered “low art” in traditional discourses, is interesting in how it reconciles the positioning of quite weighty existential questions in the context of its day. The phrase itself might be drawn from far older discourses on faith or structures of belief. David transposes it to the realm of fandom and the millions of words produced as fanfic during the heyday of The X Files where the publicly atheist cool fans of the show and other comparable genres candidly reveal a more agnostic or undefined spiritual aspect of their existence: “I want to believe.”

Craft is used as a similar tool of gentle alienation for the pressing questions in her more recent body of work involving piping oil paint onto various surfaces and objects. While there is a shared interest in craft—cake decorating, embroidery, marbling or ceramics—generally associated with women, notable in works of earlier generations of feminist artists, David’s interest seems less linear in terms of associating it with gender identity politics. Rather, she appears more interested in questioning the relationships between craft (traditionally “low art”) and painting (traditionally “high art”). In her work, materiality, whether in paint or frosting, becomes a locus for us to place the human yearning to express a kind of spiritual transcendence not easily explained away by logical animal behaviour.  

(above: Karen David, Santa Fe, Art Lacuna, 2014)

Read More about Karen David on her website here

Keep an eye on our Instagram channel: the next artists are already creating their own works inspired by the house. We're doing it IN HOUSE.