Glass, PVC, Metal; blown, assembled. Sculpture with 2 glass tusks and a trunk made of gray PVC with a metal rod for support and shape on the interior. 3 pieces mount on wall to form elephant.

An installation artist, sculptor, designer, educator, and independent curator, Caroline Prisse represents a new generation of artists who work primarily with glass, but who approach their work as visual artists. Prisse has a strong background in the history and philosophy of contemporary painting and sculpture, and her work is not object-based or process-based. Rather, she uses glass as a point of departure in the investigation and presentation of ideas and issues. As the head of the glass program at the Rietveld Academie, the premier art school in the Netherlands, Prisse does not insist that her students work only in glass. They mix glass with other media, and often undertake projects in which glass is minimal or absent. Prisse views the glass concentration as a method of approach, a way into a subject, rather than as a commitment to the exclusive use of the material. Much of Prisse’s installation and sculptural work is concerned with the environment, ecological systems, and a changing natural world in which species disappear daily. Elephant is a trophy head that does not celebrate the catch and kill, but brings attention to the danger of extinction that such great mammals face. Prisse’s recent curated exhibitions include “Jung, Frisch und Frei—The Young, the Beautiful and the Really Annoying” for the Glasmuseum Alter Hof Herding in 2010; “Domesticated Wilderness” for Platform 21, Virtual Museum, Amsterdam, in 2009; and a survey exhibition, “Glas/s,” of 40 years of glass at the Rietveld Academie, with curator Titus Eliëns, for the Gemeentemuseum, The Hague, in 2009. Prisse also serves as a curator for the Dutch Zuiderzeemuseum in Enkhuizen. Unsigned. Published as Oliphant Trophy in Titus M. Eliëns and Caroline Prisse, eds., Glas/s: Gerrit Rietveld Academie Amsterdam, 1969–2000, Zwolle: Waanders Uitgevers, and The Hague: Gemeentemuseum, 2009, p. 95.