YAERIN PYUN

ARTIST STATEMENT

Using ceramics, Yaerin Pyun defamiliarizes the things that are familiar to us to encourage audiences to look closer at details and rediscover the hidden aspects of everyday life. In this context, ceramics make her feel the value of everyday life. Consequently, she believes that if people look inside objects, even the tiny things are connected to the entire world. That is why even things that are neglected or considered worthless are so special to her.

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Inspired by her familiar natural heritage in South Korea, her work often features weathered stones, moss, flowers, and snow-covered landscapes. Yaerin is interested in natural elements because she believes that the ever-changing nature of elements reflects human life. The fact that everything changes doesn't make things valueless or meaningless; rather, it reminds us that each moment of existence is precious and significant.

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In this context, she emphasizes the dualities of life and death, value and worthlessness, beauty and transience, impermanence and permanence through natural elements like stones, grass, moss, and flowers. Her work transforms seemingly solid and unchanging stones into fragile, hollow forms and the fragility and ephemerality symbolized by grass, moss, and flowers into something solid and enduring through ceramics. Therefore, her work blurs the boundaries of the fixed meanings of objects through this ambiguity, providing new possibilities for the imagination.

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Her practice involves layering multiple coats of clay and glaze on surfaces and melting raw stones and rocks at high temperatures, creating the effects of time's accumulation and chance. In this process, she explores the boundaries of metamorphosis by attempting to shift the fixed meanings of objects, suggesting a transformation into objects that hold their own unique meanings within the constantly changing flow of life.