Kartini Thomas

Born in the Philippines to ethnologist parents, and raised between Australia and New Zealand, Kartini Thomas is an American ceramist who uses playfulness to combine sweet monstrosities and peculiar forms. Her atypical sculptural corpus draws inspiration from two sources: her observations under the microscope as a biology student, and the pantheon of gods and mythical creatures that swarm in the folkloric imagination of the countries she visits. Protuberances, tentacles, toothed mouths, and flowing bubbles give life to ceramic creatures and fragments of the fauna and flora of their wonderful habitat. Kartini Thomas puts her rich technical know-how at the service of a strange beauty, playing with the repulsive and the endearing, through a candy-like palette of pastels. Born of porcelain and stoneware, her textured-body beasts emerge in the rush of creation, as the artist allows the medium to dictate their final form. Adding to the uniqueness of Thomas’s work, her pieces are neither fixed nor for the eye only: some of them, modular, are to be assembled and disassembled at will, inviting one to grasp them by the sense of touch. Her play mobile sculptures defy categorization, straddling the boundaries of craft, design, and contemporary art.