Red Lodge Clay Center Long-Term Resident 2019-2021
Soojin Choi was born and raised in South Korea, and has been an artist based in the United States since 2010. Soojin earned her BFA at Virginia Commonwealth University in 2015, majoring in Craft/ Material Studies and Painting/ Printmaking. She then pursued her MFA degree in ceramics at Alfred University in 2018.
She was a resident artist at the Northern Clay Center in Minneapolis, MN, Red Lodge Clay Center in Red Lodge, MT, and Archie Bray Foundation in Helena, MT. Currently, Soojin is a resident artist at The Clay Studio in Philadelphia, PA. Her work transforms objects, figures and spaces into visual language through the repetitive layering flat and spatial surfaces.
Human emotion comes from the interplay between people, physical space, and emotion itself. The ambivalence of human emotion occurs through unresolved and confusing situations in external and internal matters. An ambivalent moment reveals itself to me, and I depict that gray area of humanity.
I recount these unsettled situations so viewers can empathetically encounter the emotions of the human forms I create. I employ a multifaceted approach to convey the ambiguity of emotion, employing a blend of flat and spatial surfaces, subtle facial expressions, gaze, body language, color, and brushwork. Building the surfaces with clay allows me to seamlessly weave between dimensions and textures to articulate feelings of ambivalence.