Description:

Recollections of Jeju Island: Remembering through Touch

How might we keep memories of shared family experiences alive by designing objects used in daily life? If that memory is given a physical shape and form, can it remain in the present for longer? Unlike in the past, people now take pictures and videos to record precious times using only their eyes and ears. In comparison, making memories with all your tactile senses becomes possible to move your sensory record into your long-term memory, ensuring recollection. Objects, crafted with intent, offer an active means to engage one's tactile senses by creating physical and visual sensations. In this way, crafted items provide an excellent medium to transport the landscape and spaces of memory, through touch and feel, back into our busy lives.

I have striven to activate memories through touch to keep them close at hand, creating tactile objects that celebrate and recollect the colours and textures of significant places. The travels I took with my family when I was young became the inspiration for this research. Reconstructing these journeys, I explored haptic design and created evocative colour palettes to represent the passage of time. Inspired by Jeju Island's colours, shapes, and textures, I have explored the relationship between geographic and emotional topography. Combining ceramics and textiles to craft experiences that evoke the land as a site for memory. I have used ceramic and textile production methods to create a picnic-like experience that reimagines the past as a tactile feast, bringing those distant close.

To me, Jeju Island is more than just a place to go on a family outing; its landscape, colours, and forms contain our travels.
As people follow the abstract images in the rug, people can also notice the real place of my mother's and my memories. Starting with Mt. Halla in Jeju Island in the centre of the rug, there are mediums that can remind me of the past, such as camellias, canola flowers, and hydrangeas. The locations of all parts of the island share memories of my mother and I and are made based on real locations, and each rug is made according to the colour of our memories.
These ceramics were meant to show that the memories are shared and come together. It was made to achieve harmony even in the colour of ceramics. The vivid pink from my mother's colour palette and the cream colour from my colour palette blend together to create a pale pink. These bowls are designed to be used on both sides. In particular, the inside and outside colours are different is to show the harmony of each other's memories.

It was designed as a picnic mat because the trip to Jeju Island came as a special excursion rather than a daily life. However, to keep these memories alive, I designed them as daily life objects. I hope that many people can learn how to remember their memories through touch by looking at my work.