'Doula' 2022
digital print, hand stitched muslin cotton diapers, chintz cotton, straw, house fan, and wire. 200cm x 150cm.
A recurring image of Korean stone stacking, referred to as 'doltap', began when I encountered some arrangements in my Mother-in-Law's garden. Interconnected themes around parental love; especially in a Korean context, based on the geomantic practices and suspensions in Pungsu-Jiri, and the lithic metaphors that are embedded between these overlapping themes. One week later my child was born. I attempted to make a bridge between my own narrative and my new surroundings in a way that sought to question and carved out a different commentary on the dominance of our Anthropocene.
I never could fully subscribe to the onotolgical offshoots that come from this. Instead, I try to make metaphor and language through objects, acknowledging their being as divorced from thinking, but I do so with thinking myself in mind. An object must still allow me to experience the world through it, even if this is deemed inauthentic. To host the paradox.
I took close-up photos of the rocks in a stream outside my home, like an amateur geologist seeking something that wasn't quite clear yet; exploring metaphorical entanglements through the ‘known’ limits of the material. The images are digitally reworked and 'stitched' together and printed onto my child's hand washed cotton diapers, which I hand stitched. The work includes images of construction work taking place nearby, a manifesto for parenting in both Hangeul and English, illustrations, and depictions of fatherhood in popular culture and history, notions of protection, and failures to protect. In the lower center, a photo of my baby sits, fulfilling a conventional composition usually found in the 'Madonna and Child.' It was at this point I realised I had made a self portrait with shared identities.
