Recipient of the Walkers Ceramics Award.
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Kerrin Samuel is a multimedia ceramic artist who creates artworks that explore the human experience. She draws inspiration from observations of contemporary culture, politics, geopolitics and religion which she sees as powerful vehicles for her social commentary.
Her research combines olfactory, visual and auditory senses as well as light and technology—including QR codes, NFTs and Augmented Reality (AR)—with the artisanal craft of ceramics, thus taking her three-dimensional clay sculptures into the fourth dimension.
In QR Me (Sounds like “Cure me!), versions of Victorian-era porcelain pillboxes were made contemporary with working QR codes in reference to the the context of a global pandemic, with links to articles about pills taken for some of the many ramifications of Covid-19 including anxiety, depression and vitamin D deficiency.
Kerrin’s current work, Ode to Joy and Resilience consists of a full range of decorative ceramic techniques that include glazes, underglazes, lustres, glass melting, and decals. Depicting a copious abundance of flowers (both realistic and abstract), her sculptures exude a sense of joy on the back of fragility, metaphorically demonstrating the human desire for happiness but also how easily the spirit can break and shatter. Utilising floriography (the language of flowers), scent and semi-abstraction, the flowers are her offering of pleasure against the melancholy, loss and heaviness of recent times.
Kerrin was recently a finalist in the 2022 Muswellbrook Art Prize, North Queensland Ceramics Award and the Wyndham Art Prize. One of her works was the only ceramic artwork selected for the online exhibition of the Lethbridge Landscape Prize Salon Des Refusés (2022).
