Picture nature, collage and contemporary art and your mind’s eye might conjure up images of Peter Doig’s oil painted river scenes or Alex Katz’s illustrative landscape paintings. It’s not often that textile art -- let alone quilting -- is synonymous with this visually playful oeuvre, yet South Korean textile artist Eun Jung is making new moves between these two traditional art forms, inspired by South Korea’s distinctive rice mills.
With a keen eye for patterns found in nature, Eun Jung’s small-scale quilting works blend the graphic structures of South Korea’s architecture with the soft, wandering forms of its landscape. A self-taught textile artist, Eun Jung thinks of these quilts as akin to paintings or even photographs, drawn from comparing her own memories of visiting the rice mills as a child with the sight of them when she returned as an adult, hiking through her home country.
Dyeing each of the fabrics in order to curate a palette filled with romance and wanderlust, these quilts veer into abstraction, mirroring the life cycle of memory itself. Concerned with preserving a sense of the architectural memory of South Korea’s rice mills, heritage plays an important role in Eun Jung’s practice. As the rice production industry in South Korea becomes more and more mechanised each year, her textile art traces its heritage as a way of resisting its loss, resulting in an array of marriages made between art and craft, the personal and the cultural, the natural and the manmade.
