Nayoung Jeong

Artist: Clay Structures and Psychological Space----------- My work explores how clay bodies and ritual performance can function as coping mechanisms in response to the social and political realities of displacement. To date, my habituated clay structures have reflected my own process of overcoming cultural isolation between Korea and the United States. As a global citizen, I have created my work as a refuge and source of comfort to alleviate the confusion stemming from living in an unfamiliar place. While functioning as a method to overcome the challenges of displacement, my work also attempts to recognize how these challenges push me to create. My safe, healing spaces are created by hand. They arrive cloaked in the dust of my memories, steeped in Korean ritual and history. I also invite my viewers to engage their sense of foreignness when encountering my work.

[ourrisd]

Far From Home

Travelers zipping through Rhode Island’s T.F. Green Airport this summer may want to slow down on their way to baggage claim and take in new work by recent alumna Nayoung Jeong MFA 14 CR. Her thought-provoking ceramic objects are part of Personal Space, a three-artist exhibition on view through September 1. 

“The work began in a Wintersession alumni residency I completed at RISD in January,” says Jeong. “That experience led to the exhibition at the airport.”

Jeong was born and raised in Korea and uses her ceramics, sculpture, painting and performance works to explore issues of cultural isolation and displacement. “My safe, healing spaces are created by hand,” she explains in her artist’s statement. “They arrive cloaked in the dust of my memories, steeped in Korean ritual and history.”

[nayoungjeong]

Exclusive Diary

             This sculpture functions as both a diary and a home for the artist. Shaped like a tepee, it encloses the artist. The inside is black with chalkboard paint. A single piece of chalk sits before the opening, so I may write my diary inside. My diary entries are also sprawled on the floor behind the opening, with my own language acting as a shadow. I audio recorded the sound of my chalk hitting the inside of the piece; the recording of my diary transcription always accompanied the exhibition. Viewers had only the sound of my writing to deduce my inner feelings.

[nayoungjeong]

A Personal Cave: \ˈli-sən\  \ tu̇\  \ˈyu̇r\  \(ˌ)in-ˈsīd\

A Personal Cave is an interactive installation offering shelter and personal safety. Inspired by animals’ self-protective behavior of covering their heads when they are afraid, I created hanging “caves” in which viewers can insert their own heads for self-protection or perhaps escapism. The viewer’s breath produces vibrations and acoustic effects, which, together with the interior patterns of dotted fingerprints eliciting the markings of a heartbeat monitor, create the feeling of being in utero.

[nayoungjeong]

Column

     Column challenges the need for protection and creates a phobia of shelter, forcing one to look outward, rather than inward. A frightening environment exists inside the piece, resembling the human digestive tract. The uncomfortable atmosphere provides new ways to explore pushing myself beyond the protective spaces created throughout the scope of my work. There are five windows at various points of the column for me to look and exit out of. When viewers look in at me through the windows, I appear that I am being digested, further establishing my need to escape shelter.

이중성의 고찰

안과 밖의 다른 색의 표현, 보호의 필요성과 방어벽의 공포를 동시에 발생시켜 다른 느낌의  속과 겉을 보게 만든다. 인간의 소화 기관을 닮은 조각들이 내부에 존재해 무서운 환경을 자아내며, 그 불편한 분위기가 내 작업의 범위에 걸쳐 생성 된 보호 공간과 내 자신을 넘어 탐구하는 새로운 방법을 제공한다. 다섯 개의 창은 내가 밖을 내다보고 벗어나려는 다양한 지점을 제시하며, 관람객이 창문을 통해 볼 때, 나는 그 안에서 소화되어 가고 있고 더욱 더 그 피난처를 탈출하려는 필요성을 느낀다

[nayoungjeong]

Cocoon. #ceramics #clay #art #cocoon #metal wire #sculpture #hand-building #performance

[nayoungjeong]

RISD MFA show 2014 #Rhode Island School of Design#Master of Fine Arts#2014#shelter#hands#ceramics#porcelain