Image credit Jumi Park
Growing up in Korea, I observed my mom's handcrafting, passed down from my grandmother, a Hanbok dressmaker, and practicing handwork came to me naturally. Thus, I define craft as memories about childhood, family, and womanhood that I want to collect and preserve as physical manifestations of past fragments. My ongoing experience of originating in Korea and settling in the United States serves as the lens of my practice.
My textile work delves into relationships between the human mind, feelings, and things into a theme of self-awareness, identity, and perception, questioning societal norms and pressures. Being interested in the universe as the source of all things, I approach my work through science and spirituality, investigating the measurable and immeasurable. I believe thoughts, emotions, and objects hold different vibrations at a specific frequency and direction and are all interconnected. This relationship, which I conceptualize as a spiritual link, is expressed in fiber materials such as yarn and rope, signaling the continuous spinning of thread and the structure of a web.
The sensitively woven space embraces countless interactions and entanglements between different cultures and times as if there is no start and an end. It incorporates female-empowered handcraft and explores my interpretation of modern craft with extensive research. The labor-intensive handcraft technique combines my intuitive expression and patience, creating irregular and infinitely variable organic forms merging microscopic images, nature anatomy, and biological complexity. The repeating gestures of textures and colors involve a deeply meditative process and calm endurance as a force in my work.
November, 2023