THE SHAPE OF LIFE: CERAMIC SCULPTURES BY JOON HEE KIM

‘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