Master of Fine Arts Thesis
Translated; Ephemeral and Solid
Ara Koh
Submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirement for the degree of
Master of Fine Arts, School of Art and Design Division of Ceramic Art
New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University Alfred, New York
2020
Ara Koh, MFA
Thesis Advisors:
John Gill, Johnathan Hopp, Matt Kelleher, Walter McConnell, Linda Sikora, Meghan Smythe
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A B S T R A C T
This written thesis presents the formal, aesthetic, material, personal, cultural, and conceptual aspects of my studio practice.
My studio practice is a form of translation. Working with clay is a vehicle for memory, honesty, reflection. There is room for awe and even for childhood trauma, fading or relived. My sculpture encapsulates the dialogue of internal memories and external landscapes. Making is reliving fading traumatic memory as a landscape painting.
Landscape made in clay links to geologic time and metamorphosis. Questioning how architecture and landscape hold humanity, I think about my body contained in the spaces, my body as a container, and the space being contained in the larger body of humanity.
This body of work claims my position of authority; a space that is my own space.
Physically imposing enough to envelop the viewer, intensity of the labor, repetitiveness, and palliative obsessiveness manifest as understanding of the universe.
Keywords : Landscape, Memory, Korean, Female, Clay, Physicality, Claiming Space, Time, Repetition, Sculpture, Installation, Geology
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A C K N O W L E D G E M E N T S
to two women god blessed my life with
To my mother
who showed me courage, patience, and love
To her mother
who taught me grace, endurance, and love
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T A B L E O F C O N T E N T S
Abstract 2
Acknowledgements 3
Table of Contents 4
Thesis
Translation 6
Memory of Landscape 9
Time 11
Becoming Clay 14
Physicality 15
Installation 17
Claiming Space 19
Epilogue 20
Appendix 22
Artist Statement 23
Technical Statement 24
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T H E S I S
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T R A N S L A T I O N
From a very young age, I spoke both Korean and English. Growing up bilingual provoked questions about my identity and insecurity about my ability to understand other people in a different cultural context.
When I held a job as a translator was when I became intrigued by the process. The hardest thing was interpreting an abstract concept in one cultural context that does not exist in the other.
There was always a gap between a word and its understanding. Narrowing the cultural gap, my role as a translator was to be transparent. My voice was disallowed in the translation, subservient to the words and the voice of the original writer.
Clay never had a gap. Clay is the language I speak when spoken languages fail. I loved speaking clay because my voice could be there, with myself completely immersed. I translate memory and my understanding of the world in clay. I translate experience. I translate the invisible and amorphous into something seen and soild.
I materialize memory into three dimensions. I feel as if I am moving between dimensions, space and time. Moving between the intangibility of memory and the solidity of sculpture is a complex translation. It is somewhere between translation and transformation.
7 I was six.
That day my parents drove up to my grandfather’s place, which was a routine for every weekend.
But it wasn’t quite the same that day.
After we arrived, my mom walked me into a room, told me not to come out and closed the door.
There, I
felt the cold floor on my feet,
ornately lacquered mother-of-pearl inlaid closet on my back, and a landscape painting on the wall before my eyes.
The painting, painted in the hands of my great-grandmother.
Framed, behind the glass were mountains after mountains, depicting sceneries from her memory.
Ink dilluted mountains layer by layer into dark green.
Painting was so quiet, no man but only mountains and water.
I heard fighting noises soon later.
I wanted to open the door and see what was going on outside, but I didn’t since my mom told me to stay in the room.
I opened the door after quite a while.
I witnessed my grandfather and my dad fist fighting.
My aunts were trying to separate them physically.
And when two men got away from each other, he dragged her into the other room, threw her to the corner and started hitting her.
I still remember the blue and green bruises on her body.
Oh the bruises.
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In Korea, I was a disappointment since I was a girl. My grandfather wanted a grandson, insisting the family name should be passed down through male generations. My dad was his only boy. As an only grandchild and female, I thwarted his plans.
But my lingering trauma is not simply about rejection but also protection. While I was an utter disappointment to my grandfather, my parents sacrificed to embrace me as who I am. It was their way of showing love and protection.
My work resides in the distance between contradictory states of conflict and coexistence.
This incompatibility arising from psychological trauma is translated through material, into visual tension between something hidden and something exposed, between the ephemeral and the concrete, the known and unknown. Immortal and momentary, femininity and masculinity, outspoken and shy, being a painter and a sculptor coexist in my work. Making contrasting polarities coexist is building permission. I seek to balance what lies within me and the outside forces that made me who I am today.
Putting my claywork at the very core of my practice, I present two experiments in this thesis. I separate clay and glaze from either side of the room. Sand-cast glaze panels flank unglazed columns of red clay, separating the inseparable, resisting the conventions of traditional expectations on ceramics. Hanging above, a light and airy wire sculpture contrasts the gravity of clay. I’m seeing an optimal balance between light and heavy, dense and loose. It invites different material and working methods that seeks out perimeters of traditional norm of ceramics.
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M E M O R Y O F L A N D S C A P E
Conundrum and Obstruction, Bisqueware, 2019
Trauma is an event in a life that changes a person. It shapes what you become and how you see the world. Experience lives in that day and makes the days after that day. Landscape painting summons the memory. The rivers and mountains are blue and green bruises on my mother.
The sound of conflict bounces back and forth within painted mountain ranges. The landscape painting so vividly imprinted on my memory colors the way I see the world. I learn about myself through the work that I have created.
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I am not the victim of a story. I’m not an object. I am not a landscape painting and nor is my work. Landscape is the visual entry point. Transported landscape; clay marks the beginning of my practice and connects with the actual landscape that we are standing upon.
Making is recovering something. Builiding is reliving. Memory travels. In my memory was the ink painting of mountain ranges, the black ink was diluted into the green. As ink fades, memory fades over time, losing specificity. As I try to remember this painting, it’s nebulous. My memory is misty, overcast, watermarked, watercolored. Its soft and subtle nature translates in my sculpture, yellow, orange-to-tan color suggests warmth. Reminiscent of valleys and scenes of the American west, or somewhere warm and south like the Grand Canyon. A memory from East Asia is translated to North America. Maker and viewer see the landscape, but each makes their connection to landscapes they are familiar with. I believe by working from the very personal will resonate to the most universal.
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T I M E
Core Samples, Bisqueware, 2020
Earth is built upon time, visible as layers of strata and irregularity of outlines. Curved plains remind the sedimentary deposit of clay. Layers have built up over the years and erosion washed away. This phenomena speaks of metamorphism through how it is formed. How geologic time creates a landscape is alike to what trauma does to human beings.
My work is painted with layers of time. It reveals as my color palette expands and time accumulates. Every day I walk into the studio, make a new batch of clay with scraps from the previous day. Without exactly knowing what color the batch may be, I continue to build. It is a rhythm that records a day, a year, a life. I am building my past and future.
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Strata stacks as time accumulates. Alike core samples, the thickness of the colored bands reveal time. Lines swell up and respond to the one prior below. Clay and time create a sedimentary pattern, visually memorizing the process of building, coiling, blending and smudging.
In each piece contains time handmark by handmark, and coil by coil. Finger marks soothe, as if reassuring the material, “It’s okay.” The marks become texture. The wall itself is not pristine.
The texture flattens with another layer of depth and hides its vulnerability. The texture makes the color even more subtle, blending the two-dimensional landscape pattern into the three-dimensional form. The color and texture are formal and sorrowful, repetitive and endless. Texture is insistent.
It vibrates and formulates trauma.
The terror and wonderness of trauma is akin to that of overlooking the grandeur landscape.
When the clay cracks, it speaks. Cracks speak of a tectonic shift and its tension. There were huge changes to this mountain, this sculpture, this human has been reconditioned.
Rare Momentum, Unfired Clay, 2019
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Clay remembers the direction, pressure, and feeling. It records my time. Following my finger trawl, the shattered light on my sculpture lies, viewers could touch the time and tactility with their eyes. Tactile senses are enhanced as the visual language speaks. Walking around my sculpture, they trace the footsteps that I took around my studio, the kiln, and the staging of the sculpture.
Vitrification or firing transforms the work beyond its visual. Fired clay has a sense of maturity, transition, and durability. Wet clay experience and fired clay experience is very different, much more than what is seen. Wet clay liberates from the kiln limitations, either size or shape, and sometimes gravity. The process being so visible makes its intimacy. Wet clay is sensual and sensory, allowing the maker to bodily engage and express. It is the palliative performance of making that is my outlet and catharsis. It is against the conventional ceramic process, but in a way is the very primitive way of art. The touch and impression of the material is the work itself. Just like metal rusts over time, clay dries, cracks and reveals gaps; space where moisture was holding.
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B E C O M I N G C L A Y
Growing up in Korea, I’ve been very well trained to be polite and obedient. There were always certain ways to behave. I never asked questions nor was I curious why I never asked questions. Questions lived outside of my perimeter. I thought I was doing what I was supposed to do; being a good girl. But now upon reflection, that young girl was a wallflower.
There was a discord inside me rejecting that trained-wallflower. With clay, I became myself. Clay understands and allows me to be wrong. I open up my desire and emotions without worry or guilt. I do not apologize. I make decisions and act. Clay demands honest and candid reflection.
Clay is metaphysical. It was made from the earth that we are standing on right now. Earth becomes plastic and pliable as it becomes clay. Clay is a common language and common ground.
Clay never needs translation. People do not have to speak to understand. People do not have to learn because they already know. Earth to me is human and, beyond human.
Every human is clay. We came from the earth and will dissolve back to the earth. We live in earth. We walk on earth, breathe in earth and rely heavily on earth. I work with clay, that allows me to work with four elements that are essential to life, earth, water, air, and fire. For me, speaking clay is a blessing. Clay is the most internal language I speak to communicate with myself and to connect with others.
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P H Y S I C A L I T Y
I was born and raised in Seoul. The capital city, home of 9.8 million people, is a huge metropolis where skyscrapers, high-tech industry meet Buddhist temples and ancient palaces.
Vastly different time frames coexist within the architecture of the city. Contemporary urban- planning enables flora and fauna to live next to the river that ran through the landscape for thousands of years. Landscape and cityscape overlap. I grew up within a landscape of tall, rectangular, box-shaped apartment complexes wrapped within diminished green spaces and among the green potted plants within my tiny apartment.
Architecture and landscape hold humanity. In common sense, people live inside architecture, and architecture is sited in landscape. Could this order could be reversed? It is the other way around in my memory. Landscape lives in architecture -- like in Seoul -- and architecture resides in people. I dream about my body contained in the spaces where I was raised, and in this universe. I think about my body as a container and the space being contained in the larger body of humanity.
The imagery of landscape frequents my work and my memories, especially mountains, through color and pattern. In the work “Core Samples”, its overall character -- columnar standing upright and scaled to my body -- is confrontational. My work is figurative through a relational scale. The footprint of my sculpture corresponds to the length of my feet and the width of my shoulder. I adjust the heights of my sculpture according to bodily relations in space. I think of my sculpture as a cast of my body’s externals, my physical measurements, and a cast of experiences
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internalized, of landscape paintings remembered. I aim to have artistic reflections originating in my body be extended to the viewer’s body.
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I N S T A L L A T I O N
My work is to be experienced and consequently physically imposing enough to envelop the viewer. I want viewers to walk into the space of the work and just be there. I draw in space, I sculpt the air. I am shaping the tonalities of space around the work. I set the temperature of the work. I create an atmosphere where the viewer breathes in.
I seek to temper four formal elements of my installation – the space around the work, the pedestal, where the work sits, and the artwork itself. The rhythms in arrangement release time to flow in a horizontal manner as the viewer walks by. I question what it means and feels like to traverse the space. Is the presence of the work completed by the movement of viewers through the work?
I have concluded that the meaning of the installation lives in the ‘experience’ of the people.
Space, weight, gravity, process, and time evoke imagery. Installation work compels the viewer to assemble impressions from multiple points of view. As one scene feels familiar, another can seem foreign depending on the viewers' perspective, in or outside the sculpture, or far off in the distance.
giving a different meaning or feeling. Through this sense of shifting unfamiliarity, I expand my outlook on space.
Installation reflects my curiosity to alter and intervene in space’s character and flow.
Operating as a group, sculptural objects have a presence that is hard to ignore. They can shape the space around them, playing a crucial role in employing the space where the work is placed, the
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process of making and the time people experience. The space my work charges meets light and darkness to create a contiunous spectrum of space.
With light, it shimmers. The presence of woven wire sculpture is uncertain, alike to how reality and shadow operate. It is there but not there. The form appears, disappears, and reappears.
It is light and delicate. It makes you float and looks ethereal. Fluctuating overall form looks flexible, ambiguous and ambivalent.
Up close, there are small squares and rectangles varying its size from the fingernail to the palm, connected to one another creating an irregular grid. A thin strand of wire that is loosely woven together makes a big sheet of fabric just as how lines gather together in a two dimensional plane. And the plane describes a solid; geometric figure in three dimensions, creating volume in space. This fabricated sheet gets draped from the ceiling, wrapping the air and space around.
As perspective changes, lines glint. As moving, my existence move in and out of the sculpture. I am engaged, but I question where I really am. I am bodily present, but where does my existence really lie? Is it in the sculpture as I am deeply involved? Or am I heavily focusing on myself by moving? Or does my existence live outside of the scene created? The formal entity of the sculpture and my existence shifts back and forth.
My pieces breathe in and out the air I am breathing in and out. With air present, sound, vibration, and my existence resonate within the piece. The breath pattern that I am involved in makes it more plausible. I aim to create a “breathtaking” scene.
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C L A I M I N G S P A C E
My work insists being physically challenging to make. Either by numbers or size, the sculptures call for presence. This comes from an ephemeral place, where memories and present experience insist on significant materiality; a confrontation. Physical time represents and strengthens as I repeat. Physical burden of the maker plays a big part in claiming the authority of space. Installation claims space as landscape claims space. It shows itself. But while making, I have nothing. I make because of the need of myself just wanting to see it, touch it, grab it, and feel it.
There is the intensity of the labor, repetitiveness, and palliative obsessiveness. It becomes the vehicle for understanding identity. My work is a visual representation of my identity and confirms owning my identity. It is what I am, and what I believe in. It is as if the work is saying
“Here I am. This is my space. This is who I am.”
Thomas Merton said “Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.” Repetitive process makes complex hypnotic patterns. I lose myself. I do not feel any emotion. The process brings me to a state of zero(0), all gone. In endless repetition, I face my most candid self. There are no shortcuts, and or easy ways to get around it. There is no fairy godmother who could whip a magic wand. It is a practice, exercise, exploration, and study. It teaches me about myself and the world. is an act of making, that manifests the understanding of the universe.
1 Merton, Thomas. No Man Is an Island New York: Dell, 1957.
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E P I L O G U E
My work is driven by experiences; cultural experience to be exact. These experience are not available in the work, nor do they need to be communicated. But I want the story to come out of the closet now, most timely than ever. In the past, I feared of me unveiling would make my loved ones feel uncomfortable or sad. I do not fear anymore. It is in the past. But I am doing, to add this to my thesis to open up my personal, proclaming myself as a female maker in the early 21st century.
The ambition and intensity in my work is connected to conviction of my significance as a person. What is really significant in the childhood memory is the three generation of women around the room. It’s about being a woman in Korea. The abuse, physicality; fist fighting and hitting, is side effect of larger problem which is a cultural and gendered problem of the way women had been denigrated.
My personal experience translates to broader audience. I think it is fair to say that through humankind across the globe, women had been subservient to men. Nowadays, patriarhcal society had been threatened. Women are gaining more power.
My body of work is me stepping into the power. I’m the pivot point of my family line. I’m not going to carry on sexism that is disguised as tradition; male name or faternal domination. I’m turning the culture. I’m claiming my position of authority; a space that is my own space. This is the beginning of me claiming my role as a women.
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Flame matures clay, as time matures human. This is why I work with clay. To mature myself and know. What material could better portray human other than clay?
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A P P E N D I X
Artists whom I got inspired from;
Richard Serra(1938~), for installation and presence of the work
Isamu Noguchi(1904~1988), for extensive use of space and its possibilties Antony Gormley(1950~), for reasoning of body
Claude Monet(1840~1926) and Claude Debussy(1862~1918), of ability of capturing image El Anatsui(1944~), at the fine line between art and craft
Inchin Lee(1957~), of the artistic manner and craftsmenship
Arlene Shechet(1951~) and Annabeth Rosen(1957~), for expanding vision on female maker Walter McConnell(1956~), for exanding what ‘clay’ can do
Mark Rothko(1903~1970), on his “simple expression of the complex thought”
Seo-bo Park(1931~) and Tae-ho Kim(1948~), for repetitive art making process
Unknown painter of Scholar’s Accoutrements(Joseon Dynasty), for dimensional representation
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A R T I S T S T A T E M E N T
I speak Korean, English, and Clay. Clay enables speech. It is permissive. I translate my memory and understanding of this world in clay. I translate the invisible and the amorphous into something visible and solid. Moving between the intangibility of memory and the solidity of sculpture, polarities coexist in my work. A balance between light and heavy, dense and loose, seen and invisible, ephemeral and concrete invites different material and working methods.
I think of my sculpture as a cast of my body’s, externals; my physical measurements, and a cast of experiences internalized; of a landscape painting remembered. Questioning how architecture and landscape hold humanity, I think about my body contained in the spaces, and my body as a container. Experiencing body and reasoning what that experience does is questioning self in relationship with space. Physically imposing enough to envelop the viewer, intensity of the labor, repetitiveness, and palliative obsessiveness is an act of making that manifests the understanding of the universe.
My body of work claims my position of authority; a space that is my own space. It asks the maker to both look out and look in. It asks about my identity as an artist, a daughter, and a human in the most honest and genuine way.
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T E C H N I C A L S T A T E M E N T
Sand Cast Panels
I make an inch-thick bed of sand on the kiln shelf. I intentionally sprinkle grog on top of the bed of sand to make it have more impurities.(Grog I use is made from my old sculptures crushed up.) I pat it out with my hand allowing the bed to flatten and level out. Then I mix a glaze the thickness of honey. The thinner I make the glaze, the further spreads and tends to break easily.
The glaze has a white color with a little bit of warmth. I use a spoon to draw a pattern or even just lines on the sand bed. Glaze becomes very porous on the top side where it does not have contact with the sand looking like sea sponge(left). On the bottom side where it does meet the sand, it has sandiness to it, with some black-brown impurities from the silica sand itself(right).
I fire it to ^6 in a fast glaze cycle. When unloading, I make sure to have a bin with a mesh under where I massage the bits with my hand to get rid of the excess sand. Sand tends to clump into quarter-sized chunks that are easily breakable but needs to be seived for later uses.
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A 35x35inch panel needs glaze bits that could fill up 14x14x20inch box(3920 cubic inches). After I have collected enough fired bits, I glaze the fired bits in the same glaze that the bits are made of. The freshly glazed bits go on top of an inch thick sand bed making a new pattern.
I pile these glaze bits, making layers, often becoming 2~3inch thickness. The bigger the finished product is, the thicker it has to be for strength. Otherwise, it breaks at the thinner parts. In the picture, I used drywall to prevent thermal shock between two 14x28” shelves that might make it crack in the middle. Also just making the crack disappear with a thin coil of wading worked just fine.
I fire it to ^6 in a fast glaze cycle, let it cool, and unload from the kiln. This has the same unloading process of massaging the sand out from the bottom. After this firing, the thickness of the tile becomes less than a half-inch thick. The thicker and bigger the tile gets, needs more kneeling fire to prevent it from cracking from the thermal shock. I fired going up in temperatures
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for 10 hours and did kneeling fire for 15 hours.
Recipes
Glaze mixture; it is a half ^10 studio glaze “Yellow Salt” and half sodium bicarbonate.
Sodium Bicarbonate 100
Nephline syenite 71.5
Dolomite 23.5
Om4 5
Zircopax 15
Red iron oxide 1
Bentonite 2 (for 200g batch)
Wading
EPK 50
Alumina 50 (for 100g batch)
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Pillared Landscape
I do not have a specific clay body recipe. All the clay that was used to build my sculptures is reclaimed clay. The only thing that makes my reclaim clay different is I make small batches every day. I make a small batch of clay every day. Before I leave the studio, I gather bits of clay around my studio, or anywhere in the Harder Hall and soak it in water. The next morning I come in; into that slurry I pour grog(made from my old sculptures crushed up in the hammer mill, and jaw crusher in the grinding room), kaolin powder, trimming of a wheel-thrown functional ware, nylon fiber, hemp fiber, shredded paper, mineral oxides, leftover stain, leftover glaze, and engobe or anything really that could work as a clay, filler or colorant to the clay body.
After I mix the slurry by hand, I pour it onto a plaster slab. It dries out in 12 hours, and I get the clay off before I leave, and wedge it into a ball. The plaster slab dries out overnight so that I can make more the day after, but it needs to be dried out on a plaster dryer once in a month. I like to build my sculpture on top of a dolly so that I could turn the piece and transport easily. On a dolly, I sprinkle a generous amount of sand(or fine grog does the same job) and put a sheet of drywall that is bigger than the footprint of the sculpture. This allows the sculpture to sit on drywall to slide off from the dolly and into the kiln more smoothly. (putting a sheet of melamine board or anything with a smooth surface on top of a dolly helps as well) I spray the drywall with water so that the bottom of the sculpture does not dry out so quickly. On top of the drywall, I sprinkle a bit of sand and put a sheet of muslin(any type of fabric would do) soaked in water to allow the bottom of the sculpture to shrink without cracking. (see diagram on next page)
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I roll out a slab that is a bit bigger than the footprint, trim the excess, and start building.
Wedging clay is happening at the same time as building. After maybe two or three 10 inch coil, I wedge in different clay about the amount I used for building. Then building, more wedging, and the process of building and wedging gets repeated. To build a relatively straight, visually and also to make the piece balanced so it does not tip over, I used a laser level to check the edges of the sculpture’s verticality.
It takes about 3~4 days to make 70” tall sculpture. So when I need to pause, I score the top of the sculpture with a serrated rib and put on a sheet of muslin on top. The muslin is soaked in water, then wrung to remove dripping water. If I were to not come back in a few hours or to wrap up a day, I put a sheet of plastic over the whole sculpture to prevent muslin from drying.
When I reached the desired height of a sculpture, I pinch the edges thin, and the areas that are adjacent to the edge to gradually make the wall thinner. I leave them for about half a day or a heat gun directly to dry the thin top part to secure its shape. After it has reached the leather-hard
Dolly
sand drywall
sand muslin Clay
sculpture
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stage, I wrap the whole sculpture with a thin sheet of plastic, tightly on top and loosely on the bottom. It allows the sculpture to dry out evenly because the top part likes to crack when dried too quickly. I dried sculptures wrapped in plastic for two weeks, and 3+ days uncovered.
Even though I try hard, because each clay body is different, it likes to crack even from drying and makes it unsafe to grab just the sculpture and transport. Each sculpture gets transported to the kiln on the individual dolly that it was initially made. The whole dolly is slid on to a fork of a forklift to lift it vertically. A forklift is moved to the kiln bed as close as it could go and slid onto the kiln shelf sprinkled with sand to make the slide. I do not mind the cracks, but I do mind the warp, so I try to dry and transport carefully and candle the kiln as much possible. The cycle I used to fire these sculptures is;
RAMP Increase per Hour Target Temperature Hold
1 20 200 10hr
2 20 240 5hr
3 50 350
4 75 900
5 100 1100 0.5hr
6 110 1700
7 108 1900
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Wire Hanging Installation
I used 26 gauge bright color floral wire. It is very bendy and easy to manipulate and make shapes. I shaped them into little rectangles form(size ranges from an inch to 10 inches) and twisted and intertwined them to make a strong join. I keep on making those shapes until I get the size of a sheet I want.
The overall size of the wire installation as a single continuous sheet is 7ft wide and 190ft long. As for making, I kept the piece rolled in an 8ft long, 10 inches diameter tube, sandwiched in a thin industrial tarp so that the wire does not get caught to the layer over and under. (see diagram below)
