About

Kerstin Schaars creates clay sculptures, drawings and puppets that she then uses in short films. Heavily influenced by the camera trickery of early movie-masters such as Alice Guy and Buster Keaton, Kerstin uses cinema as a means to address the ambiguous tension between delight and melancholy, or magic and reality. She travels extensively to shoot very ordinary things. This includes hotel rooms, bellfries, birds, clean laundry on wire, ports, fishmongers, relics and vegetable salespeople in cities such as Paris, Venice, Istanbul and Tokyo.

She has collaborated with metalsmiths, weavers, clothing designers, musicians and visual artists on site-specific installations. She is currently at work on a film trilogy structured around the two-reel (twenty minute) program of early short films. 

She lives and works in Chicago where she trains in martial arts alongside her two children.