Caroline Blackburn, is an award winning native Los Angeles sculptural ceramic artist, who creates vessels that explore her interest in abstract painting, architecture, fashion, and nature. Caroline studied Art History and Studio Arts graduating Magna Cum Laude from Boston College. At Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California she studied with some of the foremost artists of our times while earning a MFA focusing on fine arts.
In 2014 Caroline received California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, University President’s Purchase Award (grand prize) at the Ink & Clay 40 exhibition and first place at the Beverly Hills Art Show in the spring of 2017, among many other awards.
Caroline’s work is inspired from her extensive professional career for over thirty years in the Arts. While at the Museum of Contemporary Art from 1988 – 2002, she designed the museum’s educational programs and worked directing many of the distinguished exhibiting artists. Caroline worked for UCLA Architecture from 2002-2018 directing print, media and marketing for the university. Being saturated with contemporary art and architecture at this level is a rare and amazing opportunity that has shaped her understanding and artistic interpretation of art, architecture, and design.
Trained as a painter, her sculptural ceramic work focuses on bringing a freshness and immediacy to each piece through color, form, and surface texture. Every work is one of a kind whether it is thrown on a wheel, hand built, or a combination of both techniques. While investigating an interest in form, the work produces a continual shift between surface, texture, color and object. Each vessel provides a contemporary sense of life that is very personal and universal at the same time.
Caroline has a wide vocabulary of glazes with which she uses to accomplish the intense active surface in each piece. She juxtaposes color, texture and drawing using a variety of materials to accomplish a painterly surface including ceramic pencil, slip, oxide, or glaze creating a sublime effect, reflecting phenomenon found in nature. Color plays a significant role in the work. When she glazes a work she approaches it as a canvas. She may first apply a slip, draw on the work with a ceramic pencil, and then hand-paint each piece with brushes of a variety of widths to accomplish a painterly sublime effect and finally grind the surface with a stone.
Cool Heat, Offramp Gallery, Pasadena, CA, May 31 – June 28, 2015