March 9 - 12
Mourning Birds
2021
hanji, graphite, gesso, porcelain, watercolor paper, 70 x 87
Detail from Mountain Walk (Memory of a Temple)
2022
hanji, graphite, porcelain, watercolor paper, 75 x 92
Artist Statement
In my current practice, I assemble drawing objects using hanji, gesso, graphite, silk, and porcelain with watercolor paper. Rather than offering immediate legibility or explicit representation, each mixed-media work asks the viewer to contemplate the intersecting timelines of its composite pieces.
Hanji is handmade mulberry paper from Korea, where it has played an integral role in everyday life. Traditionally, the material has been used for making doors, screens, and lanterns. In the West, hanji usually serves to repair and mask damaged manuscripts. I explore my relationship to these disparate histories through an iterative approach, cutting up materials to suture together fragments of previous ‘originals.’ I develop these originals through improvisation and in conversation with shapes and colors from Korean ceramics and folk arts, Buddhist temples, and historical screen and scroll paintings.
As I mend torn layers with hanji fragments, shapes from the originals disperse, intermix, and reassemble. Unexpected textures and patterns form at the seams. Often inscrutable, these shifting substrates and surfaces gesture towards the excavation and preservation of embedded, or inherited, histories and memories. As physical expressions of continuous, recursive making, these works are often large format. Their scale engages the viewer’s body, questioning its typical relationship to domestic objects, architecture, and landscape.