MA Ceramics & Glass, Royal College of Art, 2024Alexandra Kim's practice explores the tension between tradition and subversion, creating ceramic works that balance the human-like and the abstract, awkward and graceful. Working primarily with clay, she employs hand-building techniques such as coiling to craft large-scale sculptures. One particular series serves as both homage and subversion of the Korean stone fertility statues of Jeju Island – 'dol hareubang' (stone grandfather) – reimagined in feminised form as an articulation of femininity, womanhood, and expectation.Alexandra Kim (b.1998) is a Korean American ceramicist from Newton, Massachusetts. My process in ceramic sculpture is intuitive and organic. Such themes include my Korean American heritage, female labour, fertility, and rebirth. My most recent body of work encapsulates the tension between two ideals of womanhood: traditional expectations from my Korean heritage versus contemporary concepts imbued in my American upbringing. Through large-scale coil built sculpture, I explore the push and pull – works that are both awkward and graceful, anthropomorphic and abstract.
Concerned about buying a piece you haven’t seen in the flesh?
We don’t currently have a gallery space where you can view the work in person, though depending on where you’re based, a studio visit can sometimes be arranged. What we’ve found, overwhelmingly, over twenty-two years: when someone falls for a piece on screen, the real thing is more, not less. Colour, surface, scale, presence. It works that way around. It’s why, across two decades, our returns have been minuscule.
But rest assured: if it isn’t right when it arrives, it can be returned within fourteen days.
