Karen Hoisington is best recognised for her expressionist landscapes. Moving away from nature themes featured at Singapore Art Week 2024, this year, she turns her inspiration to Singapore's public housing agency—the world-class Housing Development Board (HDB)—as a dweller, herself, in one of her “eagle nest” units looking over the parks and beaches of Pasir Ris. She draws inspiration from the ephemeral light that bathes the urban scape before her, stating:

I aim to paint my observations from emotional responses and memories that have struck my attention when riding the train or bus past several HDB estates, marvelling at their architecture, environment, and the people that live there. The textural technique used on the paintings is my way of expressing the density, mobility, and molecular feeling that distinguishes this lifestyle in Singapore.

Her paintings are a form of fiction that conveys the spirit of urban landscapes through abstraction. Urban Drift, titled as the view from an aeroplane window on landing in Singapore and witnessing HDB flats slowly blanket the island like a sluggish tsunami, is a show of 44 works as "spectral, ghostlike abstractions" of Singapore's public housing that loom in an atmosphere of orderliness and harmony accentuated by her free colour sense.