Studio Information
About The Artist
Pattern is my visual language, a way to navigate and make sense of a complex world. I naturally seek out connections between objects, people, or even fleeting moments to make sense our surroundings. Sometimes these patterns are so subtle they go unnoticed, yet I sense their continuity just below the surface. Revealing this hidden connective tissue between form and its surroundings lies at the core of my practice.
My ceramic sculptures draw inspiration from a landscape rich with structural references from architecture, textile construction, even the human body. I pare form to its essence, exposing a slightly brutal beauty and emphasizing the interplay between surface and structure. Rather than mimicking pattern, I abstract it, allowing it to shift, fragment and evolve from its original source. Through repetition and methodical sequencing, form and pattern emerge organically from the building process itself. Nothing is extraneous.
I’m obsessed with light, shadow and translucency. My sculptures explore space that feels simultaneously contained and porous, as if revealing the skeletal framework left behind once the outer layers peel away. This spatial tension is as crucial to shaping the form as pattern is to illuminating its physical essence.
Weaving form with such a malleable material as clay grounds my practice. It’s responsive and transformative, recording my gestures and driving an intuitive creative process. Clay guides a dance between hand and head, often moderating the form to its whim. It possesses a weighty permanence, and yet, carries a sense of fragility and porousness. I embrace these contradictions, pushing against the limits of the material and seeking the precious edge just before collapse. My work is a dialogue with material, grounded in a reverence for repetition and craft.
Karyn Gabriel is a ceramic artist whose work merges art, craft and design through material exploration and an intuitive, process-oriented practice. Grounded in pattern as a visual language, her sculptural objects engage a dialogue between containment and openness. Elemental forms are both solid and porous, revealing their internal scaffolding and celebrating the underlying structures that often go unnoticed beneath the surface. Building upon an extensive career in architectural design, Karyn actively bridges dialog between creative design thinking and the expressive, open-ended mystery of artmaking. It’s a marriage of these two forms of expressive art which drives the work.
Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, Karyn earned a BFA in interior architecture from the University of Michigan and continued her studies at the Oregon College of Art and Craft, where she received a Post-Baccalaureate Certificate in sculptural ceramics.
Since establishing her studio practice in 2018, Karyn has exhibited across California and the western United States, including presentations at the Crocker Art Museum, the Di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art, and the Marin Museum of Contemporary Art. In 2025, Karyn earned recognition as an Emerging Artist from Ceramics Monthly. She has participated in artist residency programs at Anderson Ranch Arts Center (Colorado) and Penland School of Craft (North Carolina).
Beyond the gallery and studio, Karyn’s work is held in numerous private and public collections across the U.S. and her work has been featured in Ceramics Monthly, California Homes, and California Home + Design magazines.
Ceramics, Sculpture
