Karen Loader is a professional artist living and working in London.  She graduated with an MA in Fine Art from City & Guilds of London Art School in 2017.  She was subsequently shortlisted for the ARTIQ/Herbert Smith Freehills Graduate Art Prize in 2017 and the Collyer Bristow Graduate Award in 2018 and 2019.  In 2022 she was shortlisted for The Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize.

Previously she received a first class BA (Hons) degree in Fine Art from the University of East London in 1999 and since then has taken part in numerous group shows and art fairs. Her work is held in private collections in the UK, Europe and the USA.

Loader creates site responsive installations and paintings that refer to representations of man-made and natural phenomena to construct a rhythmic interpretation of place that is both physical and psychological. She is interested in how our perception of place is formed, not only by our visual observations of it, but also by the sensations we feel when moving through that place. Her work is influenced by modernist architecture and minimalist aesthetics as well as an interest in philosophical theories concerning the subjects of place and space, phenomenology and perception. She is always actively seeking to balance the interior with the exterior, the internal with the external. Allowing the viewer to navigate the work both physically and imaginatively, she aims to choreograph an experience that alludes to the urban environment and how we exist within it.