Kara Chin creates installations that have included kinetic and robotic pieces, animation, sound, water features and horticultural elements. Her work focuses on the implications of fast evolving technologies; ethical conundrums and potential consequences of developing robotics and artificial intelligence.
Her work often draws together handcrafted and readymade objects, organic and synthetic materials. Her installations are constructed as cross sections of fictional narratives that weave throughout her practice. Anthropomorphic features, limbs and moving elements are used to transform sculptures into animated creatures; characters through which we can empathise and examine individual experiences within these imagined future scenarios.
At BALTIC 39 Chin presents Sentient Home Devices (virtual edition) (2019) and A Mass of Possessed Plumbing (2020). These are manifestations of fictional future household appliances gone rogue, a modern retelling of tsukumogami (in Japanese folklore these are tools that have acquired a spirit) where our smart household appliances transform into sentient home devices, sprouting limbs and morphing into bizarre hybrid contraptions. Complicated machines that hint at, once prescribed functionality, but given free will, reject their tasks and flounder about pointlessly. The spirit of the tsukumogami inhabits these works.