Karen Harsbo, born in Japan, living in Denmark, is an artist, curator and associate professor at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Art. She graduated from the Danish Design School in 1987 and has exhibited widely, including in the acclaimed Topographies of the Obsolete at the British Ceramic Biennial, 2013. She co-curated The Magic of Clay at Gallery Holtegaard in Denmark featuring artists including Ai Wei Wei and Grayson Perry.
Karen is occupied by how thoughts and knowledge travel in and through materials, and how material traveling between cultures and in history is accompanied with knowledge and ideas.
Having ceramic as her basic material, she uses its raw materials for experimenting and exploring methods and ideas, and to study its long interconnection with history and culture.
This project stems from her curiosity in the history of porcelain and the process of working with porcelain.
From how porcelain was invented in China and later laboriously transported via the Silk Route to Europe. How alchemists in Europe experimented to find the formula, and how it during the Enlightenment Age became a major industry with exports to the whole world. And how production once again has gone back to the East. It is a story that generates multiple routes and maps. It is routes of human curiosity and knowledge. Karen has been interested in the people who have been part of these places – workers in the East and the West.
Karen is presenting her work to students at Brighton University.
Karen Harsbo’s work can be seen here