Soyun Jung

Textile sculptor

©soyunJUNG

Bringing fibres to life

Soyun handcrafts sculptures out of fine thread
Her pieces are formed with layers of thread sewn on top of each other
Inner questions and landscapes are her inspiration

Soyun Jung’s textile works are organic forms that contain her personal experiences and emotions. Tactility and ethereal beauty of the soft fabric she uses are one of her outstanding characteristics. Soyun plays with transparency and opacity, denseness and lightness which she builds up through a delicate process of transformation by hand and sewing machine. After she received her bachelor's and master's degrees in textile arts from Ewha Womans University, she wanted to keep up manual working process and become a full-time craftswoman. Soyun's creative expression and her energy to create stem from the feeling of vacancy and the longing for her father who passed away in her adolescence. Her creative method, in which thin threads are piled up one after another through time, resembles the quiet and poetic way of life she pursues in a remote village in South Korea.

Interview

©soyunJUNG

©soyunJUNG

What inspires you?: I try to search for moments or landscapes that give me comfort. I currently live in a very small town in the countryside. A lot of nature such as huge mountain ranges surrounded me. It has captivated my heart, and I have been working on translating this into textile art.
What type of thread do you use?: It is a thread called monofilament which is transparent yarn. The reason why you see the different layers of colours is because I dye them myself to get the effects I want before sewing.
What is your production process?: First I make a drawing on water-soluble fabric, which I thread with a sewing machine along the lines of the drawings on the fabric. A free-motion embroidery presser foot is the tool that allows me to sew in a free direction as well. After I finish the sewing, I melt the water-soluble fabric. And then only the work made with thread remains, like a sculpture.
What technique would you like to develop in the future?: I am very interested in Korean traditional and natural materials. I think that materials from nature such as ramie or hemp and silk go well with humans, who are also part of nature. It requires a lot of research to know the right way to combine them with machine embroidery, and I am working on this.

Soyun Jung is a rising star: she began her career in 2017