Kara Chin Profile

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.