About the Artist
Kara Lin is an artist based in Virginia. They work across multiple creative disciplines, including costume and fashion design, silversmithing, sculpture, and oil painting. Regardless of medium, their work consistently centers around a gothic aesthetic. While originally focused on representational figurative art, Kara has recently begun exploring surrealism—investigating the space between dreams and nightmares.
Artist's Statement
My art is a reflection of the emotional duality I live with—the extremes of joy and despair, clarity and chaos. As someone with bipolar disorder, my inner world is often in flux, and painting has become a way to give form to what feels intangible. The surreal elements in my work allow me to explore this shifting internal landscape: dreams colliding with nightmares, vulnerability masked in grandeur, and moments of stillness suspended in psychological tension.
Rooted in a background of costume design, sculpture, and classical oil painting, I use the body as a stage—draped, adorned, fragmented—to explore identity as something unstable, performative, and deeply felt. My aesthetic remains gothic and emotionally intense, drawing from Baroque drama and personal mythologies to express the fragile boundary between appearance and truth, self and shadow.
Yet in the act of creating, there is release—a breath, a ritual, a form of alchemy. Each piece becomes a way to not only reveal what is difficult to hold, but also to reclaim it. Through art, I make space for both darkness and light, and in doing so, I find moments of stillness, meaning, and hope.