The intensely detailed, hand-drawn work of Clare Kim consists of tightly-rendered lines of text used to create figurative objects and abstract forms. Her pieces explore the nature of spiritual and cultural narrative and the transformation of textual information in a fine art context.
Although drawing material from a diverse range of sources, mythologies are of particular interest to Kim. The use of archaic moral and sometimes religious stories reflects nostalgia for a purity of information that is virtually non-existent in contemporary society. Since the explosion of open encyclopaedias, media newsfeeds and blog networks, information has become overabundant, unreliable and increasingly meaningless.
Kim’s work offers a respite from this. Her small works repackage shared cultural knowledge drawn from digital sources, books and oral narratives in a form that redirects attention to the value of this information. These texts are treated equally, whether ancient and sacred or contemporary and questionable. Kim reimagines the information as a gift, waiting to be unwrapped, or an abstract form, inchoate and emerging from the white noise of modern media.
To this end, Kim positions art-making as a transformative process. She is interested not only in how presentation changes information, but how the act of recontextualisation can affect its meaning and significance. Kim’s manual transcription of text on the tiny scale at which she works is astonishingly demanding, requiring almost superhuman precision, perseverance and commitment. Thus, her work itself takes on a spiritual or religious quality; the devotion of time to the creation of these text-objects echoes the work of monks through the Middle Ages reproducing religious texts. There is a fervency that suggests a transcendence of human limitations, adding further significance to the texts and the art-making process.
The forms of the works are often physically determined by the texts themselves. Writing derived from the Book of Genesis is drawn in the form of a tree, while more abstract pieces share qualities with the subjects of their texts. An untitled piece consisting of text about crows evokes the appearance of a bird’s wing, with the changing linear formation of the text adding textural depth to the work. The tightly coiled spirals, loops and whorls of text in many works suggest the forms of fingerprints. In a recent series, confessed secrets are reinterpreted to take on this form, furthering the link between physical identity and personal narratives.
Through drawing from such varied sources as Wikipedia entries, biblical texts and fairy tales, Kim democratises text, destabilising the power structures that we rely on to authorise information. Thus, Kim’s work challenges the paradigm of the Information Age by reinvesting text with the beauty and complexity it once possessed. The delivery of information in her work is paradoxical—though the information is obvious, it is ultimately inaccessible. This calls attention to the way we perceive images and information in a contemporary context and questionswhether fairy tales, mythology and doctrinal texts can be made relevant in an image-dominated society. In this way, Kim’s work encourages viewers to take a reverential view of written knowledge and information and to regard it as art in its own right.
BIOGRAPHY
Born: Pusan, South Korea
Lives: Auckland
Education: Bachelor of Fine Arts (Hons), Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland; Visual Studies and History of Art, University of Toronto (Exchange Programme)
Awards/Distinctions: Signature Piece Award - Finalist (2010); NZAAT Artist Grant - Finalist (2010); Walker & Hall Waiheke Art Award - Finalist (2010)
Public Exhibitions: Walker & Hall Waiheke Art Award Exhibition, Waiheke Community Art Gallery, Auckland (2010)