Born in 1964, Jessica Song has a multi-cultural background, having spent her childhood in South Korea, growing up in Switzerland, and later being educated in the United States and France. She studied Art History at the University of Utah in the United States and further specialized in East Asian art at the Sorbonne University in Paris. Her commitment to ceramics is rooted in her Korean origins. In collaboration with the Kyung Hee University in Korea, she found inspiration from porcelain shards retrieved during archaeological excavations. For her, those fragmented pieces are a testament to the course of time and a tribute to manual labor.
Carrying on the living tradition of clay-making, Song has focused her attention on the potentiality of glaze. Under the guidance of Helena Klug and Augusto Tozzola, she integrates the technical knowledge of materials with representations of nature. The references to topography, flora, and fauna imbue her work with a pure and simple beauty and enormous vitality. Her pursuit of surface texture reflects a desire to express the sense of unfinished-ness and metamorphosis.
Song’s interest in materials has led her to monotype, wherein an image is created on a metal plate and then printed. The image is created using a brush or fingers, so the shading effects can be very subtle. She continues to explore the possibilities of printing techniques by combining different material languages with elements from varied cultural backgrounds. In Give Me Your Eyes, she prints photographic images manually on porcelain with black pigment. Her Endymion (2019) adopts xylographie and collage techniques to represent the figure from Greek mythology.
She opened her studios in Belleville and Auribeau sur Siagne in 2001 and 2006. Her work has been included in exhibitions held in Paris, Zurich, Geneva, and so on. Song currently works in Geneva, Switzerland.
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