Soony Eunsoon Seo in Night Garden

Soony Eunsoon Seo

Night Garden

This series, entitled "Night Garden", explores the uncertainties of expression and the attaching process. It is representative of the reality of my memory and my underlying abstract landscaping. This process of recycling and attaching extends my practice of painting beyond a superficial activity and into the space between lingering memory and art. The title, "Night Garden", refers to a process of unconscious psychological growth that is at the core of series.

            
For years, I have gathered torn and ruined canvases. I hid them in my studio corner until I realized that they provided the perfect material to explore my psychological landscape. Instead of using the traditional clean canvas, I used my trash left-over from my art-making. The idea to experiment with left-over trash is connected to the daily life of my grandmother and my mother. It was necessary for them to recycle materials for living and at the same time, to create beauty for the household. When I was a kid, we had a traditional Korean paper door.  This paper door was vulnerable even to slight pressure from fingers, and was often ripped. My mother would cure the damage by covering holes with paper and also layering with flowers and leaves to decorate. I thought that was beautiful; it was art-making in life.

             My approach has been intentionally rendered to present psychological landscapes produced by methods of recycling memory and art. Originally, I used a method of attaching pieces of torn canvas repeatedly to create a background for my portrait painting. However I recognized in this harsh and ripped texture, with its spontaneous threaded lines resembling roots and branches, a portrait of my inner garden which expressed the unconscious, spontaneous, and gestural layers of context in my mind. My paintings are generated by torn canvases and threads, whose harshness is mitigated by lace which recalls the flower patterns on my mother’s door. Floating on these layers are my subconscious and unconscious inner mental shapes; to emphasize this raw and dreamlike texture, I restricted the color palette.