Framing memory in windows
- Namkyung combines photography and print processes to create jewellery
- She is inspired by backlit windows, shadows and window frame grids
- Intaglio is one of the techniques she uses to give depth to her architectural spatial experiments
Namkyung Lee brings photography into metal jewellery, translating spatial afterimages and personal memory into wearable, architectural forms. Starting with image transfers onto quartz in 2014, she later adopted clear acrylic and UV printing to overcome jewellery’s limits of size and weight. "In my practice, I combine traditional benchwork with contemporary, digital processes," she explains. Namkyung uses photographs she takes herself while travelling, composing and editing digitally to obtain a single image. She turns these images into tactile relief and intaglio to create wearable jewellery pieces such as brooches and earrings. Since 2025, Namkyung has expanded this language through using jesmonite and photo-etching on metal. "These new materials allow me to extend my experiments in representing architectural spatiality," she says.
Interview
- What drew you to metal and jewellery?
- I have always preferred making to drawing. I chose jewellery making because it lets me build with many materials, beginning with metal as a base, then leather, beads, stones, and more. This potential constantly introduces new materials and keeps the work moving beyond one craft.
- What tools and processes shape your image-making practice?
- I built my image-making workflow by testing photograph printing and metal etching, along with extensive digital editing. From cyanotype to photo-etching and 3D printing, I use various tools to explore how photographs can become objects.
- What do you value most in the act of making?
- I feel most rewarded when I can test materials and methods and see them work. If a technique is hard to carry out, I devise an alternative, such as etching photos into metal and casting jesmonite from the plate, or engraving images into acrylic to use as a mould. Those ‘strange’ solutions keep me progressing.
- What are your sources of inspiration?
- It starts with visual afterimages of spaces: a backlit window, shadows cast across a room, the frame of an old window grid. In galleries I am often drawn as much to the space itself as to the works. Those images and moods of spaces stay in my mind and keep shaping what I make.
Namkyung Lee is an expert artisan: she began her career in 2014
Where
Namkyung Lee
