YAERIN PYUN

ARTIST STATEMENT

I use ceramics to reconfigure familiar elements of nature, making them feel unfamiliar. My practice questions the fixed ideas and values attached to familiar elements of nature in everyday life.

I believe that by observing and contemplating even the most ordinary objects, one can connect with a universal sense of life. This perspective suggests that the essence of being lies not in appearance, but in the process through which emotions, experiences, and thoughts accumulate and transform. In this sense, I regard ceramics as a medium that records transformation, disappearance and trace left in the firing process, revealing the boundary between what disappears and what remains.

Inspired by my familiar natural heritage in South Korea, my work often features weathered stones, moss, flowers, and snow-covered landscapes. I am interested in natural elements because I believe 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.

In my work, I capture the forms of rocks shaped by erosion, compression, solidification and weathering, and preserve the fleeting, fragile lives of organic beings. It serves as a kind of archive that preserves memories, myths and histories. I continually explore dualities such as life and death, beauty and transience, and temporality and permanence, weaving narratives that reflect the shared trajectories of nature and human life.

Based on these ideas, I use natural elements such as stones, grass, moss and flowers to bring dualities such as life and death, presence and absence, value and valuelessness, beauty and transience, and temporality and permanence into my work. I transform seemingly immutable, solid stone into a fragile form with a hollow. I also turn the fragility and transience symbolized by moss into something solid and enduring by coating it with slip and firing it. Through these transformations of materiality and symbolism, the value and meaning of objects are reconfigured.