(Archive) Light, Existence, Shadow

The way to record the world

Diaries, business contracts, and paintings are two-dimensional ways how humans make a record of the world. Cubism and Impressionism are examples of ways how painters portrayed the world from their perspectives on drawings. In writing, such a portrayal is achieved through various types of literature, such as poems and novels. By researching these different ways of documenting the world, Chanbyul established her unique way of recording how she interpret the world in her works.
She use a shadow as a way to record the world. Shadow is evidence of the relationship between light and objects. Light is essential to recognize an object. Lights and objects are always existent in a universe. Hence they form a shadow, which serves as evidence of what exists in the present. As such, the aspect that designer want to record about how the world functions is the inseparable relationship between lights, objects, and shadows.

Two dimensions, three dimensions and time.

An object can have many shadows from multiple lights coming from different directions. What seems like a single shadow often consists of multiple shadows. This is because there is usually more than one source of light around us, although such a fact is often overlooked. The shapes of ceramic objects are three-dimensional transformations of various shadows drawn on the surface.

Influenced by Impressionism, Chanbyul's work include time. she represents the four-dimension with the three-dimension including time on a two-dimension piece of paper. And transform it into a three-dimensional object. Einstein's theory of time and space adds time as a fourth dimension to the conventional perception of a three-dimensional world. As time goes by, a candle burns down to become shorter and shorter, lengthening its own shadow sitting beside it. Designer views it as a track of time made by light and the object. The produced drawings catch all the traces around it. As a result, this series of paintings and ceramics reflect a rule of nature.

Shadows can be tools for understanding the world

As a designer, Chanbyul hopes to deliver the idea that shadows can thus be tools through which to understand the relationships that humans form with different concepts and objects.

That is why she records the shadows of daily objects. This is to remind the audience that intimate objects always have shadows in our daily lives. Chanbyul hope that through my work, people face the shadows on their desks, in their kitchens, and in every moment and open new perspectives through them.