Katja Prins

Artist / designer – The Netherlands
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Somnium – Brooch

Materials: silver, 3D printed poly urethane, red coral

Artist Statement: At the core of my work lies a personal fascination for the inter-relationship (and interdependecy even) between our fragile human bodies and our (technical) surroundings.
By reading and researching my topics of interest, I have become aware that technology has always been our way to survive in this world and in order to survive we have been adapting our environment to our needs and by now we are adapting and enhancing our bodies and even merging it with our technologies.
Will this bring us a utopia or a dystopia?

It’s the ambivalence, the contradictions, the thin line between good and bad, improvement and danger, the uncanny valley of familiar and unknown, what always intrigued me and what I’ve been trying to express in my jewellery.

About Katja: (b.1970) Graduated from the Gerrit Rietveld Academy, Amsterdam in 1997. Since then she has worked as an independent jewelry artist.
In 2019 she graduated from a Master in Fine Arts at the Utrecht University, Netherlands. Prins’ oeuvre expresses her fascination with the relationship between technology and the human body, specifically questioning how technology functions as a support structure.

Prins’s work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions in Europe, the USA, Asia and Russia.
She has lectured and taught in institutions all over the world including at Hiko Minzuno College, Tokyo, Japan; Tainan National University of the Arts, Tainan, Taiwan; Savannah College of Art and Design, Savannah, USA; RISD, Providence, USA; University of Arts & Design Samara, Russia; Konstfack, Stockholm, Sweden; Alchimia, Florence, Italy; and the Gerrit Rietveld Academy, Amsterdam.
Her jewelry work can be found in the public collections of the Cooper Hewitt Museum New York, USA; Museum of Arts and Design New York, USA; Mint Museum of Craft+Design, Charlotte, USA; Montréal Fine Arts Museum, Montréal, CA; Musée des Beaux Arts, Marseille, France; Schmuck Museum, Pforzheim, Germany; and in the Netherlands at the CODA Museum Apeldoorn, Rijksmuseum Amsterdam and SM’s Stedelijk Museum ‘s Hertogenbosch.

Photo credits: Merlijn Snitker