Work

Polar Art Project

Glacial Bodies

Karolina Woolf is a sculptor exploring the spirit and fragility of glaciers across the polar regions. Her work is rooted in a long-standing, deeply personal connection to cold landscapes, shaped in part by her childhood in the Czech mountains, where early sensory experiences of snow and winter first took hold.

Over the past years, this connection has evolved into a focused artistic inquiry. A pivotal journey to Spitsbergen ignited a deeper engagement, leading her to continue her exploration across Iceland, Greenland, and further into the polar landscapes of Chilean Patagonia and Antarctica. These environments have become both subject and collaborator in a body of work that seeks to make visible what is rapidly disappearing.

Working across drawing, watercolour, photography, paper cut-outs, and final sculptures in glass, porcelain, and clay, she observes, maps, and translates the inner and outer life of glaciers. She is particularly drawn to the process of calving, the moment of rupture and release, capturing the transient existence of icebergs as both physical phenomenon and poetic form.

Her approach is immersive and sensorial. She enters ice caves, walks glaciers, and moves through icy waters to experience these environments directly. It is within this intersection of intimacy and vastness, familiarity and awe, that her work takes shape.

Paper Studies

2023

The series originates in Karolina Woolf’s first encounter with the Arctic in Svalbard. In the presence of ice formations in Spitzbergen National Park, the experience marks a moment of arrest, where perception exceeds the immediate ability to translate what is seen into form.

A necessary distance follows before the work can begin. The initial breakthrough emerges through painted paper cut-outs, photographed against the sky. These studies become early spatial propositions, allowing form to be isolated, framed, and reimagined, establishing the foundation of her sculptural language.

Silicone Studies

2023

Building on the formal language established in the paper studies, Karolina Woolf continues her exploration of light, transparency, and reflection through silicone. This phase shifts the focus toward the relationship between form and its surrounding environment.

The material introduces a heightened sensitivity to surface and perception. Forms absorb, refract, and respond to light and space, revealing a reciprocal interaction between object and environment. Through this exchange, the work begins to extend beyond the object itself, engaging the conditions in which it is encountered.

Clay Models

2023

With clay, an opaque material distinct from the translucency of ice, the focus shifts toward composition and structure.

Freed from the need to resemble ice directly, these works allow Karolina Woolf to explore form more freely. They function both as independent studies and as a preparatory stage for her glass sculptures.

Glass Studies

2023-2025

Glass introduces a material closer to ice, allowing for a more direct translation of its visual and physical qualities.

Through variations in composition and arrangement, the works evoke the shifting presence of moving ice. These sculptures extend the investigation of form into space, functioning as studies for larger-scale installations and suggesting how the work might inhabit and structure an environment.

Clay Paper Prints

2023

While preparing clay sheets for the sculptures, these prints emerge unintentionally, forming the patterns that echo the textures and surfaces of ice.

Porcelain & Ceramics Studies

2024

Working with porcelain and ceramic, Karolina Woolf turns her attention to the process of glacial calving.

Once part of a vast, continuous mass, ice separates into individual bodies, each carrying traces of its origin. These works explore that transition from unity to fragmentation, focusing on the emergence of singular forms from a larger whole.

Glazed Ceramics

2024

Drawing on her experience of Icelandic landscapes, Karolina Woolf develops a series informed by the coexistence of volcanic ash and glacial ice.

Layered surfaces and contrasting tones reflect this tension. The works evoke geological time, where mineral traces cut through ice over millennia, leaving visible records of transformation.

Glazed Porcelain

2025

Following her first encounter with monumental icebergs in Greenland, Karolina Woolf develops a body of work that carries the imprint of that experience.

These works approach icebergs not as fixed objects, but as shifting, elusive forms. Each piece becomes part of an ongoing search, moving closer to the essence of ice without fully resolving it.

Porcelain Reliefs

2025

Following an extended journey through the Northern Patagonian Ice Field in Chile, this work reflects a multiplicity of perspectives, experienced on foot, from the air, and across water.

The sculpture brings together these viewpoints, holding scale, distance, and proximity within a single surface. It emerges as a response to the vastness and complexity of glacial environments.

WaterColours

2026

During an expedition in Antarctica, physical limitations prompt a shift in process.

Watercolour becomes a more immediate and responsive medium, allowing observation to continue in a different form. These works retain a sense of fluidity and lightness, offering an alternative way of engaging with the landscape while maintaining continuity within the practice.