As the year 2025 begins, it’s a moment to reflect on the artists who created interesting works in 2024. Among these artists is Karla Wave, whose artistic journey is deeply connected to nature, light, and the essence of the unknown. From her early days building sandcastles as a child, with her father photographing her creations, Wave has remained on a dedicated and uninterrupted path of creation. Her ongoing series, Light Defines, reflects this lifelong devotion, drawing inspiration from both childhood memories and the harbor landscapes that now live vividly in her imagination.
For Wave, the natural world is a constant source of inspiration. The littoral zone—the area where the land meets the sea—holds a particular fascination for her. She describes her love for smoothed dunes shaped by the wind, and fields of flowers, as symbols of both permanence and change. The cycles of nature, the pull of the tides, and the transient beauty of flowers all find their way into her work. Yet, her approach is never just a simple representation of nature. It’s a poetic interpretation, often geometric and dreamlike, as if the images themselves are suspended in time and space.
Karla Wave’s creative process is fast-paced and prolific. Her work spans both images and videos, capturing fleeting moments and impressions that often relate to the theme of climate change. For her, it’s about filming to heal and remind. Nature, in her eyes, is not just a backdrop but a central character in the unfolding drama of our world. Her art is both a reflection of the beauty around us and a call to recognize the fragility of that beauty in the face of environmental threats.
In her own words, Karla Wave’s art “pulls like a sail.” The series she is currently working on, “Two Moons,” embodies this sense of movement and connection. The moon’s gravitational pull on the tides is a powerful metaphor for the way her work draws the viewer in. Light, color, and geometric forms come together to create delicate, suspended images that seem to float just beneath the surface of perception. There is an ethereal quality to her use of color—hyacinth blues, misty whites, and the untouched sands of the littoral zone—that evoke a sense of calm and stillness, even as they suggest deeper currents at work.
Wave’s work is also heavily influenced by a diverse range of creative figures, from sculptors and writers to scientists and poets. This broad spectrum of influences can be seen in the way she layers meaning into her art. There’s a sense of experimentation, a desire to push the boundaries of what can be expressed through visual form. She describes her work as a “necessary experiment,” an exploration of the “endless infinity of the liminal unknown.” This idea of the liminal—the space between, the threshold—is central to her art. Whether she’s depicting the shifting sands of a beach or the abstract interplay of light and geometry, there’s always a sense of movement, of something in flux.
The connection between architecture and landscape is another recurring theme in Wave’s work. She speaks of “floating museums” and architecture that is “grounded by landscape,” yet also “pulled like the tide from the moon.” It’s a striking image, one that captures the tension between the built environment and the natural world. In her art, these two forces are not in opposition but are part of the same dynamic system, constantly shaping and reshaping each other.
What makes Karla Wave’s work particularly different is the way she manages to balance this tension between the organic and the geometric, the fluid and the structured. Her images are at once delicate and strong, ethereal yet grounded. They invite the viewer to pause and reflect, to consider the ways in which light and color shape our perception of the world around us. And at the same time, they remind us of the fragility of that world, of the need to pay attention to the forces—both natural and human-made—that are constantly at play.
In the end, Karla Wave’s art is about connection. Whether it’s the connection between light and form, between the natural and the man-made, or between the past and the future, her work speaks to the ways in which everything is interconnected. And like the tides she so often references, her art has a quiet but powerful pull, drawing us into a world of suspended beauty and endless possibility.
