The Shape of Life

Joon Hee Kim

August 17 – September 29, 2024

Reception: Saturday, August 24 from 2-4pm
Craft Ontario Gallery, 1106 Queen Street West, Toronto

'The Shape of Life' is a solo exhibition of ceramic sculptures by Oakville-based artist Joon Hee Kim. The sculptures take the vessel form as the jumping off point — pot-like bases extend up into bodies that are teeming with life. Pushing past the boundaries of the form are sculptural collages of expressive faces, gesturing hands and everyday objects. It’s unclear whether the faces represent multiple people or the various moods of one person, but it is clear from the presence of tiny pots — miniature plates and bowls dot the surfaces — that the story being told here is at least semi-autobiographical. This is the story of a life preoccupied with vessels, told in the form of a vessel.

The sculptures bring to mind the ‘The Carrier Bag Theory of Evolution’ proposed by anthropologist Elizabeth Fisher in the late 1970s and taken up by acclaimed science fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin in a short but influential essay a few years later. The theory argues that the earliest human tool was not the spear or another weapon of domination, but rather “that the earliest cultural inventions must have been a container to hold gathered products.” The first tool was a vessel. Le Guin relates this theory to fiction writing, claiming that, “the natural, proper, fitting shape of the novel might be that of a sack, a bag…A novel is a medicine bundle, holding things in a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us.” It is an approach to human history and human stories that does not narrow in on the singular spear and the Hero who wields it, but rather centres multiplicity and complexity. These are the kinds of stories told by Joon Hee Kim’s sculptures. Stories that commemorate the mundane and ephemeral. Stories that explore simultaneous and divergent perspectives, even within the same person. Stories that are in both places at once, and also neither here nor there. ‘The Shape of Life’ is a gathering, a harvesting of life’s moments and artifacts, given form.

– Robyn Wilcox, Curator

Joon Hee Kim is an Oakville-based ceramic artist. Her career began in graphic design and art direction in her native South Korea, before pursuing an Advanced Diploma in Ceramics at Sheridan College and an MA Fine Art at Chelsea College of Arts, University of the Arts London. Joon Hee has participated in artist residencies at Banff Centre for Arts (Canada), Shigaraki Ceramics Cultural Park (Japan), Centre for Ceramics - Berlin (Germany), Archie Bray Foundation (USA), and, most recently, the Northern Clay Center (USA). Her work has been exhibited in solo exhibitions at the Canadian Clay & Glass Gallery and Art Gallery of Burlington, and in group exhibitions in Canada, the US, the UK, Germany, and Italy. Joon Hee has received grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council, and is the recipient of numerous honours, including six Craft Ontario awards and the 2020 Winifred Shantz Award for Ceramics. Her work is in the permanent collection of the Canadian Clay & Glass Gallery, Archie Bray Foundation and Dan Lawrie International Sculpture Collection at the Royal Botanical Garden (Burlington).

junniekim.com

Joon Hee Kim acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario.