"I hope my sculptures encourage people to feel more playful and relaxed about being human."
Kartini Thomas occupies a singular position in contemporary ceramics. Her practice is rooted in a world of monsters, microbiology and modular toys; a universe she conjures with equal parts scientific rigour and childlike wonder. Working primarily with clay, she sculpts landscapes populated by hybrid creatures that blur the boundary between the familiar and the fantastical, the biological and the cultural, the beautiful and the repulsive.
Thomas's artistic vocabulary is inseparable from her personal history. Raised in Southeast Asia and the Antipodes by anthropologist parents, she grew up immersed in a multicultural constellation of gods, goddesses, demons and spirits. This early encounter with the diversity of human symbolic worlds - and the fluid boundaries between nature, culture and the sacred - became the imaginative bedrock of her practice. Later, her studies and work as a biologist introduced her to the equally fantastical realm of microscopic and macroscopic life, an influence that is legible in every surface and form she creates.
Her ceramic process is meticulous and layered. Multiple firings at different temperatures, combined with a rich interplay of glazes, clazes and engobes, produce surfaces of exceptional textural variety - from powdery matte to lustrous, almost metallic brilliance. The results are never predictable: Thomas describes her process as a kind of play-wrestling with the clay, maintaining a deliberate tension between technical mastery and naïve experimentation, between control and surrender. This productive uncertainty is, for her, where the most vital creative energy lives.
Many of her pieces are modular; elements can be removed, exchanged and recombined to generate new creatures, exploiting bilateral and radial symmetry to echo the deep structural logic of living organisms. Others bear elaborate 'tattoos' in cobalt blue glaze, a material choice freighted with historical significance: cobalt has marked the ceramics of the Dutch, Chinese, Turkish, Spanish, Portuguese and Japanese traditions across centuries. In Thomas's hands, this historical resonance is activated as a meditation on cultural exchange, subculture and the construction of personal mythologies.
The creatures that emerge from Thomas's studio are, in her own words, 'prototypes or protozoa, liberated from conventional ideas of identity, belonging, beauty and repulsion.' They are neither wholly threatening nor entirely benign. They occupy a space that contemporary theory might recognise as 'otherhood', a condition of difference that is neither assimilated nor excluded, but held in productive suspension. In inviting the viewer to adopt the role of the mad scientist - to explore, rearrange, and reimagine - Thomas transforms her work into an open-ended proposition about what life, identity and belonging might yet become.
Thomas's work is animated throughout by a spirit of mischievous play and remix. Her ambition, as she has described it, is to engender a 'joyful, nebulous, inclusive curiosity', an openness to the strangeness of the world, biological and cultural alike. It is an ambition that her work fulfils with rigour, wit and unfailing visual intelligence.