YoonJee Kwak

Patterned Memories, 2025, Hand-built stoneware, gold, 12 x 13 x 13 inches. Retail Value: $2400.

Yoonjee Kwak uses clay as a way of thinking about memory, relationships, and the balance between strength and vulnerability. At the center of their practice is the vessel, a form that carries particular meaning in Korean culture. In Korean metaphor, a person who is generous, patient, or able to hold space for others may be described as having a “big vessel.” The artist draws on that idea to consider how we expand or contract ourselves in relationship with other people, and how intimacy can ask us to become both stronger and more vulnerable.

Each vessel is built slowly by hand through a meditative process of coiling and shaping. Rather than erasing the evidence of that process, the artist leaves fingerprints, coil lines, and subtle irregularities visible. These traces become a record of time, touch, patience, and the ongoing dialogue between maker and material. The resulting forms can feel delicate or precarious, yet they also possess a quiet resilience. Like memory itself, they are built through accumulation—layer upon layer, encounter upon encounter.

Across the artist’s practice, clay becomes more than simply a material for making objects. It becomes a language for exploring transformation, connection, and what it means to create space for ourselves and for one another.