Welcome to my page.

As a young child growing up in Poland (just prior to the imposition of martial law), there was a book I loved with stories and staggering images of mythical ocean creatures, sea serpents, mermaids, monsters, and heroes to defeat them. At the age of six I moved to Germany with my family, and in this overwhelming and busy transition, my book went missing. (Also lost in the move: a single letter in the spelling of my first name...) For many years, I tried to find my beloved book, but to no avail. Years later I even went back and searched every corner of the old attic myself, but I never saw the book again, and no one in my family remembered it. Even today, I still find myself searching the web for at least a few images that I think I remember through an increasingly foggy cloud of time.

This story pretty much encapsulates what drives my artistic practice: there is a sense of something fleeting and irretrievable—of moments barely grasped before they slip away. It shapes my fascination with glitches and with the fragile architectures of memory, where loss and distortion become part of the story itself. It was in 2014, when I immigrated for the second time—this time to the United States with my husband and our eleven-year-old child—that I discovered glitches as an artistic language. They became a way to grapple with the intertwined themes of memory, displacement, fear, and hope.

My paintings and collages explore the intersections of nature and technology. Working with the material infrastructures of computational imaging—infrastructures that reshape perception across human and more-than-human environments—glitches offer visual signs of the disruptions and imbalances that mark our times. Glitches—those unpredictable artifacts of malfunction—become a lens through which to examine ecological collapse, transformation, and the fragile potential for renewal.

Emerging from a deep love of the natural world, my work is animated by curiosity about the wild outcomes of digital processes. Through abstract forms and layered imagery, my works express concern for endangered environments while also affirming their resilience and strange beauty. Species such as the California Brown Pelican, pushed to the brink of extinction more than once, embody both fragility and recovery through ecotechnical interventions. Others adapt to human-altered habitats, shifting the boundaries of coexistence.

I hope my work makes visible these entanglements—between species, systems, and technologies—in the fragile passage of time. Rather than treating malfunction as error, I invite viewers to see it as a mode of attention: a way of recognizing the precarity, the interdependence, and the improbable resilience of life in the Anthropocene.

Bio:

Karin Denson is a multidisciplinary artist based in Northern California whose work explores the intersection of nature and technology through glitch-based paintings, photomontages, and collages. Born in Silesia, Poland, and raised in Germany, she moved to the U.S. in 2014 and draws on her intercultural background and deep-rooted fascination with wildlife to create pieces that reflect ecological fragility and the aesthetic beauty in technological disruptions. Educated as a Montessori, art, and special‑education teacher, Denson has worked in Germany, North Carolina, and the Bay Area, including as an art instructor at the Duke University International House, and art and resource specialist at the German International School of Silicon Valley. She is a member of Edgewater Gallery in Fort Bragg, CA, and has exhibited her works in various places around the US. Together with Shane Denson and Brett Amory, she is a member of the non/phenomenal collective.