Soomin Kim:
Soomin Kim
Media Arts & Sciences major
In making and being, I’m often working within in-between realms of aesthetics and function, memory and presence, patience and anxiety, comfort and labor. Textural memories, experiences, and materials catalyze my process, and ground me as I work. I tend to tinker on an intimate scale, repeating gestures until I feel relationships are resolved. Making becomes meditative; it offers me relief from capitalist notions of production, and calibrates me to a very bodily mode of active rest. Still water rots. But to be still is to flow with the stream.
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Sitting on the Floor, Against the Couch
fabric scraps from shirts, thread, stones
Sitting on the Floor, Against the Couch is an expression of process and exploration of diasporic habits and intentional rest in the home. Inspired by cooling mats and heated floors, familiar markers of Korean/Asian floor culture and bedding, this work is a handheld floorpiece. Forty-five superellipse-shaped quirky sack pillows have been handsewn, made at an inch scale, and grouped into grids of nine to encourage interactions with floor and space. The various ways of holding, rearranging, and/or sitting on the pieces gesture at the notion of constant becoming. Stones, carriers of thermal and spatial memory, have been sewn into each sack pillow to juxtapose the soft cloth with smooth hardness and weight, augmenting an intimate sensory experience. Similar to how the inversive circular gaps in the patterning have the space beneath them fill the piece, this work tenderly understands diasporic habits of leisure and activity in the home not merely as westernized loss, but as casual, paradoxical ways of being.
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