Caroline Andrin

Opening exhibition - April-June 2018

Achiel Pauwels - Caroline Andrin - Jorge Manilla

Caroline is Head of the Ceramic Department in La Cambre, the famous Art College in Brussels. After her training as ceramist in Geneva, she worked in Rome and Japan. She won several awards in Switserland and Italy (Faenza), had shows in Galerie Marianne Brand in Carrouge, in Oxford and Montreal, Lausanne and Delft. Eventually Caroline settled in our Belgian capital, where she runs her workshop. Galerie Puls and Galerie de l’Ô, both in Brussels invited her to exhibit. Caroline joined Becraft, the very dynamic organization for Crafts & design in the Fédération Bruxelles-Wallonie. One finds Carolin’s work in MUDAC in Lausanne, Musée Ariana in Genève and the Musée de la céramique in Vallauris.
Her work literally flows from the bizarre molds she uses as knitted woolen hats, ladies nylons, cardboard tubes and especially leather gloves. She pours in a slipclay (porcelain or clay from the Ardennes with manganese), which, when it hardens, takes on the print of the tissue, the seams and the surface. Her ceramics transform simple, soft, domestic things, through this “special ceramic effect” into hard, tangible objects. Those are her “Skin Games”, “Trophy’s” or “Lycornes”, objects that look like fantasy animal heads, hunting trophies.
“The objects form a collection of an imaginary bestiary. A collection inspired by the bewitched North of Twin Peaks, where nature, man and beast meet in a play that is at once candid, sensual and sometimes bestial. In the transformation from skin-tight accessory to mounted object, the leather gloves assume their full meaning”, Caroline says. Next to the trophies there are the “Outils”, in raku, stoneware or wood kiln fired. They are the primitive instruments by which one can end an imaginary hunt to an end. Very sensitive are the little vases she produced using the garden gloves of her deceased mom. The vegetal decors on them come from old decalcomania found in the remains of the Boch factory in La Louvière.