Sunyoung Oh

<After the feast> (2019) is inspired by the Shakespeare play, Midsummer Night’s Dream.

I depict the happenings in the feast in the mysterious forest inhabited by fairies under the moonlight through plates, vases and cutlery. The vase is a metaphoric object to fill a magical juice from a flower, which makes characters in the play fall in love with the wrong partner. The violet colour-gradation of the vase is reminiscent of the flower called love-idleness, which is wild pansy in mythology. The comical disturbance to break the balance of love is illustrated with unstably stacked-plates. Through the installation composed of domestic ceramics a dream time is drawn from imagination towards a rustle of leaves, shades of ancient trees, dappled clouds and a whiff of bowery wilderness in the fairyland.

Fairy:

Over hill, over dale,

Thorough bush, thorough brier,

Over park, over pale,

Thorough flood, thorough fire,

I do wander every where,

I paint landscape in memory of times and spaces of ruined forests and gardens. The landscape has disappeared and remains as a beautiful place in my memory.

The atmospheric painting was driven by sensory experiences from when I roamed in the foggy wet swamp full of moist green and flower scent. A theatrical illusion stirred by nature is explored by the movement of images formed through runny glaze experimentation, operating between abstract and figurative.

I juxtapose a realistic landscape in nature with a fictional place, reinterpreting the backdrop of forests and gardens from classical paintings to revive their romantic atmosphere. Transforming its traditional composition into lively configuration by vibrant brushstrokes, the fictional landscape is imbued in glaze materiality.

To express a pastoral landscape in a state of memory, I mimic trees and flowers of traditional landscape paintings by old masters such as Turner, Jeong Seon and Fragonard, transforming their compositions into new configurations through my personal visual language.  

<Shady Glade> is a re-interpreted miniature in response to a gold box <Snuff Box> in the Wallace Collection, which is decorated with floral and animal motifs. In the process of painting I transform gold scrolls into colourful glaze brushstrokes. Through my practice I intend to represent the original image, and experiment with how the image moves and shifts through the use of glaze fluxes and reactions when fired at high temperatures.

Garniture

Garniture is a set of ornamental vessels displayed in domestic interiors from the mid-17^th Century to early-19^th Century in the UK and Europe. It was very fashionable for the wealthy elite and aristocracy to decorate on top of their cabinets, chimneys, mantelpieces, cornices, doorways or on panelling around the room. The earliest vessels were imported Chinese porcelain, painting decorated in pure white and vibrant blue. In 1644, temporarily interrupted imports from China, resulted in a high demand for garnitures in the European market and the discovery of the recipe for porcelain in Germany accelerated independent production of luxurious and sophisticated vessels. Through commissioned vessel collections unified by their design and specific context, garniture reflected personal taste. At the end of its fashion in late 19^th Century, vessels were sold and split up. Today, few complete garnitures have survived and are found in historic houses.   

(Referenced from the publication: Garnitures: Vase sets from National Trust Houses, Patricia F. Ferguson, V&A Publishing; London, 2016)

Inspired by Garniture history, my ornamental vase set explores a continuity of the natural landscape, forming a rhythmical arrangement. The vessels in groups expand into a sequence of panoramic landscape.

Trees

My inspiration came from Fragonard’s Rococo painting of massive and growing trees in the forest and garden. Instead of  the main subject of flirtation in his painting ‘The Swing’ and ‘The Progress of Love’ series, I pay more attention to the sensual depiction of nature celebrated in these works.

I describe a placid garden full of wildflowers under the frail azure and imagine that the pastoral landscape spreads out beyond the limited confines of the porcelain surface and through light and shadow in the paintings, the depth of landscape is realised.  

The brief for this commission was to design a tableware set using the expansive archive of decorated objects in the Waddesdon Manor collection. My inspiration came from an 18^th-century Roll top desk in Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild’s private sitting room in Waddesdon Manor. The attraction of the desk for me is that its massive cylinder top can be opened and closed revealing inside many images, decorated with inlaid patterns which spring to life when the shelves or drawers open.

For my response, I created different types of patterns, making use of the fact that ceramics are often stored in stacks. When one plate or cup is removed from its stack, another emerges from underneath, revealing a different image.

<Fruits & Flora> - Limited edition bone china tableware collection, shown in Thomas Goode’s Mayfair showroom during London Craft Week 2019.

Available at: https://waddesdon.org.uk/product-category/homeware-and-gifts/page/3/