Caroline Landau

BIO

Caroline Landau (she/her/they/them b.1991) is a queer, multidisciplinary artist based in Oakland, California. They graduated from Carnegie Mellon University in 2013 with a BFA focused in painting, drawing, and printmaking. They completed her MFA from San Francisco Art Institute in 2016. Landau’s work has focused on site-specific moldblowing to capture the texture of wood and ice in nature. Their work has received publicity and recognition through the New Glass Now exhibition at the Corning Museum of Glass (2019), an interview with the UrbanGlass Quarterly (2020), acceptance in the Glass Meet the Future Film Festival with Northland Creative (2021), a paneled talk with the Museum of Art and Design (2021), the exhibition at the Wadsworth Museum for the exhibition, Fired Up (2022), shown work at Venice Glass Week (2023), and has work in Corning’s New Glass Review 43 publication (2023).

Artist Statement

I am an artist from Oakland, California that primarily works with glass. I make blow molds for glass, and blow glass into the molds to replicate specific structures and objects that are tied to ecology and nature. Over the past seven years I have gone to regions in the Arctic and made molds of ice and bergie bits on the shores of Canada and Svalbard. I then replicate them into glass and fill them back up with their own glacier water.

I recently made a mold of the oldest tree in the world, a part of Prometheus, a tree that was accidentally cut down in Nevada. The tree was over 5,000 years old but is now preserved in the form of glass.

I am interested in the conversion of material; from ice to water, from wax to glass through the making and moldmaking process. Through mold making, glassblowing, video, and collaboration, I highlight the process of transformation. I want to discuss the melting world, the climate crisis, and also bring light to these objects in the natural world that put a mirror up to our flaws in humanity.

Exhibitions