Alexandra Kim

About

Alexandra Kim is a ceramic artist from Boston, USA. Her process in ceramic sculpture is intuitive and organic, her pieces born from ideas and questions she finds meaningful and mystifying. Such themes include her Korean American heritage, female labour, fertility, and rebirth. Kim’s latest line of work explores the female body in discomfort, in self-consciousness, in grace, in emptiness, in beauty, and in power.

Kim recently created two large-scale works to encapsulate the tension she feels between two ideals of womanhood: the traditional expectations from her Korean heritage versus the contemporary concepts imbued in her American upbringing. Through large-scale coil built sculpture, she explores the push and pull. This particular set of sculptures (shown at the RCA final degree show and Copeland Gallery, Peckham) serves as both an homage and a subversion of the Korean stone fertility statues of Jeju Island, dol hareubang (“stone grandfather”), in an articulation of femininity, womanhood, and expectation. Echoing the abstract amorphous space of this tension between two worlds, she aims to produce works that are both awkward and graceful, anthropomorphic and abstract. For the decoration, Kim placed clean lines in colors from her hanbok (traditional Korean dress) against free, calligraphy-like strokes painted with her fingers. Kim hopes to draw a viewer in with curvaceous edges and welcoming windows, then generate confusion with asymmetry and unpredictability. The pieces are titled dol harmang (“stone grandmother”) to emphasize both the honor to dol hareubang, and the originality and femininity of her own version. 

email: ackceramics@gmail.com

instagram: @alexandrakimceramics