I Packed My Bag explores everyday objects as relics—fragments of both recent and distant pasts that continue to resonate as ghostly presences within our culture, environment, and society. Seemingly mundane items become reactivated as vessels of memory, history, and transformation forming the basis for sculptures that weave together themes of nature, consumption, and material culture.
The ceramic elements in the installation are buildt using former East German mesh shopping bags as molds. As the clay sets, the grid structure of the mesh impresses itself onto the surface, leaving a tactile, fossil-like pattern. At times, these forms resemble oversized, delicate fashion accessories—bulky yet fragile, caught between utility and ornament. Some of the exhibited ceramics remain encased in the multicolored mesh bags, blurring the boundaries between container and contained, between object and support.
For the exhibition, the ceramics are displayed atop repurposed styrofoam fishing buoys, salvaged from the coastlines of South Korea. These buoys, scarred by the marks of fishing lines, echo the imprint left by the mesh on the ceramics. Together, they create a shared visual language—a textured cohesion that links land and sea, handcraft and industry, presence and absence.
The installation unfolds as a conversation between opposing forces: solid and flexible, porous and sealed, heavy and light, East and West, memory and forgetting. I Packed My Bag g invites viewers to consider the afterlives of everyday materials and the cultural memories they continue to carry.
The phrase "I packed my bag" refers to the classic memory game where players take turns adding items to a virtual bag, each time repeating the previous items and adding a new one.
A quote by Ursula K. Le Guin's
It is hard to tell a really gripping tale of how I wrestled a wild-oat seed from its husk, and then another, and then another, and then another, and then another, and then I scratched my gnat bites, and Ool said something funny, and we went to the creek and got a drink and watched newts for a while, and then I found another patch of oats.... No, it does not compare, it cannot compete with how I thrust my spear deep into the titanic hairy flank while Oob, impaled on one huge sweeping tusk, writhed screaming, and blood sprouted everywhere in crimson torrents, and Boob was crushed to jelly when the mammoth fell on him as I shot my unerring arrow straight through eye to brain.
That story not only has Action, it has a Hero. Heroes are powerful. Before you know it, the men and women in the wild-oat patch and their kids and the skills of makers and the thoughts of the thoughtful and the songs of the singers are all part of it, have all been pressed into service in the tale of the Hero. But it isn’t their story. It’s his.
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The first cultural device was probably a recipient.... Many theorizers feel that the earliest cultural inventions must have been a container to hold gathered products and some kind of sling or net carrier.
