​

Soyul Baek (1980, Korea)

 

Despite only embarking on a career in ceramics at a relatively late age, Soyul Baek has already made a name for herself in the Korean arts and craft world, with her previous experience as a sound engineer undoubtedly contributing to the rhythmical patterns of her popular marbling works. However, unlike other such ceramics, Baek’s compositions are not left to chance, but carefully designed and executed according to a set programme. Baek was awarded a long-term residency fellowship as part of the Seoul Women’s Craft Center running from 2019-2022, and in 2022, a residency at AK Ceramic Centers in Icheon. She participated in the 2021 Kyungki Ceramik Art Biennale, and the Kyungki Ceramic Art Fair 2021.

 

Soyul Baek’s neriage works focus on a mastery of the unpredictable marbling effects that occur when one colour clay is allowed to bleed into another. Influenced by her former career as a sound engineer, Baek’s minimal unembellished forms come to life in the rhythmical, controlled chaos of the clay-marbling, processed by the turntable-like movement of the potter’s wheel. The result is synesthetic: pattern images fixated in each object, running in strata through the ceramic material itself, yet somehow mobile to the eye - the chance processes of geological time sped-up for a generation more used to dance music than ceramics.

​