In 'Life Forms,' Janny Baek Imagines a Speculative Landscape

"As Janny Baek builds sculptural ceramics of speculative beings and imagined landscapes, she grapples with these questions. The work follows its own dream logic, one that accepts incongruity and dissonance as necessary to play and experimentation. Marbling hunks of colored clay, coiling bases, and molding a singular material into something new is part of an exploratory practice that embraces transformation and its often strange outcomes."

"Neither wholly abstract nor representational, Baek's sculptures draw on natural structures and processes and invite us to question how we interpret the world around us. Recognizable forms like open blossoms, birds, and creatures are met with the unexpected. These lively components make even the more abstract works appear animate, like ambiguous organisms that might decide to scuttle away."

"My material choices are a way of thinking about natural processes: color gradients as the continuous nature of change, a multitude of colors as potential, abundance, and vitality, and patterns as signals and communications. Hovering between worlds, Baek's work populates a speculative environment in which beings morph, mutate, and blossom, their individual features forming an otherworldly lineage that's recognizable but not identical."

Janny Baek's solo exhibition Life Forms presents sculptural ceramics that grapple with how we conceive of change through speculative beings and imagined landscapes. Her work embraces transformation and experimentation, combining marbled colored clay, coiling, and molding into forms that are neither wholly abstract nor representational. Drawing on natural structures and processes, Baek's sculptures feature recognizable elements like blossoms, birds, and creatures alongside unexpected components, creating animate-appearing organisms. She employs hand-building techniques and nerikomi, a Japanese pottery method involving spliced colored clay strips. Her material choices represent natural processes: color gradients signify continuous change, multiple colors suggest potential and vitality, and patterns communicate signals. The resulting works populate a speculative environment where beings morph and mutate, forming an otherworldly lineage that is recognizable yet distinctly new.

Read at Colossal