Seongsan Art Hall

Nara Park, Kneaded Reflections, 2023, bench, flour, yeast, baking powder, butter, sugar, salt, eggs, water, vanilla extract, water, olive oil, preservative, false nails, plastic ants, dimensions variable, Supported by the 7th Changwon Sculpture Biennale 2024

Park’s work is closely connected to her life. Kneaded Reflections is based on the various physical changes she experienced during pregnancy and lactation, including her bodily experience of swelling, expansion, and stretching. Feeling the helplessness of her immobility while nursing, Park imagined a body in stillness even as it is crawling with ants as she cast a mold of her own altered form. The process of kneading a lump of flour to shape a loaf, and the form of the swelling dough, risen from the yeast, here symbolizes the changes and transformations of the female body.

 

Seongsan Art Hall

Nara Park, Mediation IV, 2023, 3D printed nylon, sand, stainless steel shelving table, aluminum trays, 90 × 60 × 90 cm

Park simulates, in nature, the human desire for immortality, drawing attention to the relationship between the environment we live in and the traces we leave behind after we disappear. In Meditation IV, the sculptures half-buried in the sand consist of 3D printed forms of the artist’s own sensory organs and stones collected from the mountains. Here, the sensory organs — our tools and mediums for perceiving the world around us — are presented as the final relics of a human’s passing. By placing stones, which are actually from nature, together with sculptures that mimic the body, Park draws a line in the sand, marking the boundary between existence and authenticity.