About the Artist
Kara Chin is a British artist and recently graduated from Slade School of Art
with a Ba in Fine Art Sculpture. Kara works across a range of mediums including
painting, sculpture, amateur robotics, animation, sound, and horticulture,
often combined in large scale, multi-sensory installations. Her work sponges
from a big soup of influences, from high and low, philosophical, scientific or
psychological studies and theories, truths and utter fictions. Her sculptures
are often created as characters, that weave in and out of physical and digital
existences from handicrafts to animated renders, each functioning as a device
or protagonist in semi-mythical storylines running through successive works.
These culminate in installations of constructed scenarios that loiter about the
edge, dipping a toe or two into extending the plot to manipulate human
experiences too.
About the work
The Propagator is something between a robot and an altar,
whose function is to germinate and raise plant seedlings - meanwhile, another
definition of a propagator is one who spreads an idea/theory. When the basil
seedlings in the Propagator are big enough, they are transferred to the
Hydroponic Basil-bots, friendly robotic creatures who offer up sensory cues,
where they can grow lavishly in a nutrient solution that is pumped and
oxygenated throughout the system, from a bucket-reservoir at the back.
The Sculptures are static in the space but plod along the animation
in a celebratory procession, spreading their basil about. The explicit word
association of basil and basal oscillates throughout, while wafting arrows
direct attention to concentrate on a focal point, as a parody of self-hypnosis.
Borrowing a meditative device used to enhance the sensation
of presence in virtual realities, the sensory experience of basil is to act as
a sensory cue, a trigger for a heightened feeling of existence in the space.
The mechanism by which the brain learns to associate a sensory cue with the
intended response is called synaptic plasticity - the ability of
neurons to apply more weight to certain synaptic connections than others, and a
brain structure that has shown to be involved in this form of learning is
called the Basal Ganglia.
