Schrödinger's Lonely Lotus

Fine art giclée print on 308gsm Hahnemühle Photo Rag. Limited edition of 150.

• Museum-quality inks and paper
• Archival lifespan of up to 200 years
• Includes a certificate of authenticity
• Your purchase directly supports the artist

Artist's Statement

I am a Palestinian Lebanese visual artist born and raised in Jordan. My practice is rooted in figuration, portraiture, and landscape painting using oil and watercolour to explore themes of identity, womanhood, memory, and emotional inheritance within the context of displacement and cultural fragmentation.

My work is deeply shaped by personal and inherited histories. My aunt, Laila Shawa, was a formative influence — her provocative, politically charged artworks opened my eyes to the power of the visual to confront silence, taboo, and oppression. These early experiences embedded in me an enduring desire to explore the intersections of the personal and political through art.

Working predominantly with the human figure, the subjects in my work have been my children, as well as the Israeli occupation and dystopian methods of surveillance against the Palestinians, and more recently, the destruction of Gaza. Most of my previous and ongoing works however, are fragmented self-portraits that depict the ongoing dialogue between multiple selves — real, idealised, suppressed, or evolving. The multiple figures employed in those paintings reflect the layered and fluid nature of identity and is an exploration of feminine subjectivity. Each figure embodies roles that women often navigate: muse, observer, sensual being, creator, thinker. These archetypes are not isolated; together they form a complex, relational identity. The composition often resists a linear narrative, instead unfolding as a psychological and emotional map that is in flux, cyclical and unresolved. 

Biography

Karma Shawa is a contemporary visual artist whose painting style draws inspiration from a number of art movements, particularly Western academic classical realist paintings of Bouguereau and Rubens. Impressionist artists Joaquin Sorolla and Renoir, as well as contemporary figurative artists including Lucian Freud and Jenny Saville, also influence her work.

Born and raised in Jordan to a Lebanese mother and Palestinian father, it was her aunt Laila Shawa’s provocative and revolutionary artworks and long summers spent in Gaza at her grandfather’s home as a child that led her to pursue painting.

She holds a BSc in International Relations from the London School of Economics and an MA in Arts Management and Cultural Policy from UCD. While her professional career began in the public & non-profit sector in Jordan, followed by a career change that landed her positions in media and advertising in Ireland, she nurtured her passion for art through years of training in classical painting and drawing with artist Aziz Amoura in his atelier.

Karma has shown her work in a number of group exhibits in galleries and art fairs in Ireland, the UK and Jordan over the past decade.