Alexandra Kim

Artist Statement

My process in ceramic sculpture is intuitive and organic, and my pieces are born from ideas and questions I find meaningful and mystifying. Such themes include my Korean American heritage, female labour, fertility, and rebirth. My most recent body of work aims to encapsulate the tension I feel between two ideals of womanhood: the traditional expectations from my Korean heritage versus the contemporary concepts imbued in my American upbringing. Through large-scale coil built sculpture, I explore the push and pull. One particular set of sculptures serves as both an homage and a subversion of the Korean stone fertility statues of Jeju Island, “dol hareubang”, in an articulation of femininity, womanhood, and expectation. Echoing the abstract amorphous space of this tension between two worlds, I aim to produce works that are both awkward and graceful, anthropomorphic and abstract. I hope to draw a viewer in with curvaceous edges and welcoming windows, then generate confusion with asymmetry and unpredictability.