ARA KOH

idkohara.wixsite.com/araangelakoh

@araangelakoh

Ara Koh was born in Seoul, South Korea from a fashion designer mother and an industrial designer father. She received her B.F.A. in Ceramics and Glass from Hongik University, Seoul, South Korea in 2018, and an M.F.A. in Ceramic Art at New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University in 2020. Her works are installations claiming space. The intensity of the labor and palliative obsessiveness manifested in her sculpture bring a fresh reveal to the ageless themes of body, architecture-shelter, and landscape. Her works have been exhibited in Korea and in the United States. Koh received numerous awards including the Minister of Foreign Affairs Honor by the Korean government. She teaches as an adjunct faculty at Maryland Institute College of Art, American University, and George Washington University. Ara Koh currently lives and works in the greater Washington, DC area.

I speak Korean, English, and Clay. My studio practice translates the invisible and the amorphous into something visible and solid. My clay sculptures serve as a vehicle for memory, honesty, and reflection. For me, building sculptures with clay is an opportunity to relive and work through fading childhood memories and traumas. In my meditations, clay building becomes an exercise in landscape painting. The ceramic pillars seen in CoreSamples embody geologic time, the earth-like patterns and color variations evoking metamorphosis. Questioning how architecture and landscape hold humanity, I think about my body contained in space, my body as a container, and spaces being contained in the larger body of humanity. Being present in my body is essential to my process, and in doing so I am able to deploy past experiences as reflections of myself in relationship with space. This group of ceramics, each a space of my own, asserts my position and process of evolution as an artist, a daughter, and a human. Physically imposing enough to envelop the viewer, CoreSamples’ monumentality also imbues the intensity of my labor, its repetitiveness and palliative obsessiveness. Here, there is room to reflect upon a multitude of polarities; light and heavy, dense and loose, ephemeral and concrete.