Crafts, traditions and the passing of time have been the themes of the last two posts. Let's start a new week with a quick look at Mina Kang, a Korean jewelry designer who works with textiles and who tries to rediscover through her pieces traditions, while considering also the introspective, meditative and therapeutic aspects of stitching.
Using jogakbo (a Korean patchwork technique, traditionally used to create domestic wrapping cloths known as bojagi from scraps of left-over fabrics), Kang creates portable multi-coloured three-dimensional structures that look stiff enough to keep their shape, but are actually elastic and light when worn.
The jewellery designer mainly uses ramie fabric, a linen-like cellulose fiber made from the stalks of the Chinese nettle plant traditionally favoured in Korea for summer clothes, because of its durability but also its breathability.
The fibers of the ramie fabric reveal a visually strong texture, but the actual textile is semi-transparent because of its porous structure.
In her creations Kang often employs a wide variety of bold colours for what regards the fabrics but also the threads that she uses to stitch the textiles together, creating in this way visually intriguing contrasts.
Her palette is inspired by mid-20th century paintings, but by the aerial view as well. Her compositions are indeed also influenced by the rural Korean landscape of rice paddies along hills and valleys.
Quite often Kang starts implusively to create a piece; in other cases she has a detailed plan and knows the shape her brooches or necklaces will take. Regardless of the shapes she may have in mind, Kang always tries to design her pieces around a story.
While her ancestors sewed jogakbo as prayers for peace, Kang conceives indeed her pieces as portable prayers for stability and comfort in our times with an added value - the process of making them gives her the chance to ponder and meditate about her own life.
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