Audrey An’s creative research explores the application of digital technologies to ceramics through the lens of convergence—cultural, technological, and interdisciplinary. Reflecting on her bicultural upbringing, moving between the US and South Korea, her work investigates the notion of homes, emotional weight of domestic space and the materiality of memory through sculptural furniture, 3D-printed clay, and hybrid digital-analog processes. Audrey holds an MFA from Penn State University, a BFA from the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University, and completed post-baccalaureate studies at Colorado State University. She has recently participated in residencies at the Ceramics Program, Office for the Arts at Harvard; Haystack Mountain School of Crafts; and the Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts. Her work has been supported by several awards, including the Center for Craft’s Windgate-Lamar Fellowship, the NCECA Graduate Student Fellowship, and recognition as a Ceramics Monthly 2023 Emerging Artist. Audrey currently maintains studio practices and teaches at The Clay Studio in Philadelphia, PA as the Prototyping & Digital Fabrication Studio Manager. She has recently taught at institutions including the Tyler School of Art and Architecture, Massachusetts College of Art + Design, and Anderson Ranch Arts Center.
My work explores the condition of being a 1.5 generation Korean-American, an ‘in-betweener’ who is not quite first or second generation enough. I examine this in-betweenness, the embodiment of emotional oscillation to seek balance. My recent works examine how curation within homes can explore conversations about my transcultural upbringing: moving between South Korea and the United States. Furniture in the domestic space shapes our identity by serving as objects for which memories accumulate. I am interested in how furniture can be used as a means to create a hypothetical space: a space to embrace an emotional state, to reflect on life, and to personify self. By creating objects and artifacts from the past and physically collaging them, I use the act of making as a strategy to investigate self-identity, and ground my sense of belonging.
Similarly to the way I move fluidly between two languages I speak, I approach my studio practice as a form of "code-switching" between physical and digital work, as well as between clay and other materials such as plastic, wood and foam. My ‘thought-objects’ are either shaped through analog handling of clay or digital fabrication techniques such as 3D scanning, 3D printing, and CNC-milling to achieve varying degrees of visual aesthetics and resolution. Scaling, copying & pasting, mirroring, and merging & fracturing objects and their randomized mix of organic and mechanized tension reflect the complex and fragmented, but essentially harmonious feelings that transcend the cultural oscillations. I aspire to create reflections of my identity to speak about my experience from the boundaries of cultural convergence. This trans-processing style of making is the reminiscence of the transcultural making of me.