Herlin's sculptures are refuges before they are objects, huts on stilts, dwellings suspended mid-air, structures that ask to be read from more than one side. Turn the piece and the story changes with it: a different silhouette, a different implied interior, a different childhood recalled. Ladders appear at the surface, inviting an imagined climb into a space that exists only in miniature. Beneath this architectural language sits a more personal one, Guinea, where Herlin spent her early years, and the treehouses and hideaways of childhood, translated here into a material precise enough to hold both memory and structure.

Each piece begins as a slab of clay, rolled out and built by hand into small architectural forms, a material Herlin describes as supple, sensitive to the slightest mark, and exacting once assembled upright. Lines, circles, squares and cubes are chiselled, embossed or applied directly into the surface before firing. Colour is not painted on afterward but developed through successive kiln firings, emerging gradually in orange, blue, green, yellow and occasionally gold. The most recent works, the baobab series, favour a matte, earthy white finish, letting sculpted branches and fine surface lines carry the piece's detail instead.