Karen Black’s paintings explore loaded social and individual narratives that blend the historical with the mythical, traversing the complex interchange between the personal and the political. Black’s recent work has taken the idea of the pause as a starting point. Like a fracture or crack, the pause splits a moment in two, whilst simultaneously unifying it. She was a finalist in the Sir John Sulman Prize at the AGNSW in 2019, 2018 and 2017.