Karin Bablok discovered the potter's wheel at the age of thirteen. The stillness and concentration of working with clay gave her a freedom that fascinated her from the very beginning. Two years later, she already knew that she wanted to become a ceramist and learn how to turn. After leaving school, she trained as a wheel thrower in Scheidegg in the Allgäu region, where she learned the craft from scratch.
In the years that followed, she worked in workshops in Ireland and the USA, deepening her knowledge of the craft and encountering different ceramic traditions. She later studied at the Institute for Artistic Ceramics in Höhr-Grenzhausen and at the Koblenz University of Applied Sciences, where influences from art history and painting enriched her work. Her professional career was accompanied by study trips that took her to China, Japan and South Korea, among other places.
Today, she works in her own studio and fires her ceramics in a gas kiln, which brings out the special properties of her preferred material, porcelain, in the best possible way. Porcelain fascinates her with its purity, silky sheen and delicate translucency, but always remains a demanding challenge. At the center of her work is the vessel, whose form, proportion and surface she explores down to the finest nuances.
Karin Bablok's vessels become a painting surface after they have been formed. In her linear painting, a precise interplay of lines connects interior and exterior space, whereas in her free painting, gestural compositions are created, carried by inner images and intuitive movements. Impressions from nature increasingly flow into her work. The garden around her studio, with its grasses, willow branches and leaves weighed down by the rain, is echoed in her gestural paintings. The result is not direct depictions, but situational traces of movement and atmosphere.
The artist writes about her work: "Repetition calms my mind. Through repetition, variations of a unique piece can be found. Those who love detail, including myself, like the nuanced play of proportions, the shifting of point and line by millimetres."
