Portrait Kartini Thomas by Peter Letron Courtesy Galerie Revel
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.
A graduate of the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, Kartini Thomas now lives and works on the island of Oléron. She has received several grants and awards, including the Prix de la jeune céramique contemporaine in 2021 and the Australian 20 Best Artists Award in 2020. Her work has been featured in numerous craft and design fairs in the United States, France, England and Australia: Collect Art Fair (London), Maison&Objet (Paris), Révélations (Paris), Saint-Sulpice Céramique (Paris), JEMA (Toulouse), Résonances (Strasbourg), Ob'art Paris, The Other Art Fair (Sydney), L'Art est aux Nefs (Nantes). Her creations have also appeared in more than fifteen group and solo exhibitions internationally.