Fantastical Microcosms
Fantastical Microcosms
So Young Park found the creative jolt for her metalsmithing in glass. While visiting Boston in the early 2000s, the artist saw the Ware Collection of Blaschka Glass Models of Plants at the Harvard Museum of Natural History, a display of famed models of cut flowers and leaves so scientifically accurate they were originally studied in botany classes. Park was especially struck by the cross sections and isolated views of plant parts, from ovaries to stamens, that revealed otherwise hidden geometries. “I didn’t think the inside of plants could be so beautiful,” she recalls. “I was kind of shocked.”
At the time, Park, who was born in South Korea, was an MFA student in metal and jewelry design at the Rochester Institute of Technology in upstate New York and had largely been making figurative works out of silver and copper. The Blaschka display compelled her to build more organic shapes and experiment with surface texture. “My forms, concept, everything was totally upside-down, changed, in America,” she says from her studio in Cheonan, one hour from Seoul.
Two decades on, Park is known for jewelry pieces that seem to freeze nature at its most flamboyant. Bedecked with concave disks, moving wires, and tiny balls, necklaces and brooches take on the guise of florets in bloom, sprouting mushrooms, waving corals, or the pearlescent insides of a bivalve. Earrings appear to dangle seed pods and glistening barnacles; cuffs seem to grow fern spores. Some pieces celebrate the natural finish of gold and silver, while others feature vivid powder coatings that give them a Seussian flair. As much as Park’s metalworks pay homage to nature’s wonders, they are fantastical in their own right. Each is a microcosm of her uninhibited approach to color, texture, and movement, harmonized by laborious soldering and welding.
As Park puts it, her turn to nature at RIT was more of a “bringing backward” than a leap into unfamiliar territory. Born in the port city of Ulsan, in southeastern South Korea, she grew up near the ocean and spent many family vacations by the beach. She recalls building castles from pebbles, making chunky jewelry out of seashells, and exploring whatever treasures washed ashore. “I would touch all the seashells and sea life, especially starfish with large textures,” she says, “absorbing their patterns, textures, and touch.”
“I touched the metal, and it felt very warm and somehow so soft—I just loved the feeling. Sometimes I feel like I’m touching clay and can make whatever shape I want.”
So Young Park
In 2010, four years after launching her studio, Park began developing her now-signature technique: soldering onto her jewelry what she calls “popping wire”—small wire strands that stand upright so they shake slightly, even making sound. The inspiration came from classic pin-art toys that register the shapes of anything (like a hand) pressed into them. Park likes the unexpected kineticism these delicate strands give her metalworks and has strived to create different textures with them. In recent years, the strands have taken on dense, unruly forms, resembling birds’ nests or wolf lichen. Park sees them as nerves—extensions of her long-standing interest in cell division and proliferation. “All the tiny elements in my jewelry can be seen as individual cells and represent the sprouting of a new life,” she says. “My work expresses life, coexistence, overgrowing death.”
This notion, too, has origins in her past. When Park was in high school and university, several of her friends died, forcing her to wrestle at a young age with questions related to mortality. Years later, in grad school, she heard a radio host say that death happens as new life on earth occurs. “So we live in an infinite cycle of death and life,” Park says. This fixation on a renewed existence is an age-old and universal one. But to Park, the message has a quiet, personal resonance in her artmaking—it’s one way for her to “give my friends a new life,” she says. “The wound isn’t perfectly healed, so making art is healing. Every time I make, I feel a rebirth.”
soyoungparkstudio.com | @soyoungparkstudio
This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts. To find out more about how National Endowment for the Arts grants impact individuals and communities, visit www.arts.gov. Additional support from the Windgate Charitable Foundation has made this article possible.
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