Kye-Yeon Son: portrait of a metalsmith

I had the wonderful privilege of meeting Kye-Yeon Son, for the first time, at her metalwork studio in Halifax

The workbench of metalsmith Kye-Yeon Son.

Kye-Yeon Son: a Korean Metalsmith in Canada

I had the wonderful privilege of meeting Kye-Yeon Son, for the first time, at her metalwork studio in Halifax recently – a visit and conversation that left me full of joyful energy. As it turns out, we will be connecting with Kye twice in 2024: at her studio in September 2024 during our trip to Nova Scotia, and in February for our trip to Collect Art Fair and East Anglia.

Professor Son is an extremely gifted metalsmith and jeweller, who after many years of refining her craft, and a distinguished academic career at NSCAD University, is turning her attention to exhibiting and selling her work.

Her platforming in London next year, as a selected artist for Collect Open 2024, will be a fantastic introduction to the UK audience - I have no doubt they will be fighting over her. Her work is well-known of the craft cognocenti as a recipient of the prestigious Saidye Bronfman Award, a Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts, in 2011 and LOEWE FOUNDATION CRAFT PRIZE Finalist, 2019.

Our conversation began with Kye-Yeon’s background and art education in Korea. Graduating from Seoul National University in 1979, she moved to America for her MFA, settling in Canada in the nineties.

I was curious to learn about the transition from an Eastern to a Western perspective. Kye spoke about the impact of the civil war in the 1950s, how from music, to food, architecture, fine art and even the education system, American culture was embedded in Korean life. This, weirdly, made her transition from Korea to the US quite easy. It is of course her own personal history that is most important to her development as an artist – Kye-Yeon’s mother was a botanist, and her love of the natural world is certainly an inheritance. 

Plant-forms and structures appear in her work – not in an attempt to depict or reproduce nature as such, more an exploration of the visual effects and the patterns of growth. Kye-Yeon works in wire – the metal equivalent to a drawn line – what she calls the “fundamental language of art”.

She talks about the significance of trees to her work – and the huge influence that Halifax, a very wooded landscape, has had upon her designs and ‘imagery’. As she drives between her school studio and her home studio she notices the pink tips of new shoots amongst the fine branches of the maple against the snow. The pure white coverage of snow – that throws the lines of nature into monotone high-relief – is a clear inspiration.

A great theme for Kye-Yeon is the vessel – she thinks of a bowl-form holding emotions (grief, love) and this motif appears often in her work, as a slight central indentation in a mandala brooch, or a freestanding piece that develops intuitively from single stems doubling and doubling, resulting in an incremental centrifugal movement out.

Her work incorporates the shimmering movement of nature – wind through tall grass – the rustling of leaves – the peeling of bark in the heat.

Moving from soldering in silver to micro-welding in steel – taking inspiration from industrial techniques – Kye-Yeon’s work is often enamelled. This isn’t possible on a larger scale – her kiln is small – so she found a different colouring process: rust. Other experiments are in lacquer and electroplating, to gradate from silver to gold. She is constantly in research-mode – as she pushes her materials and explores what they can do. She often speaks from a pedagogical-perspective and describes her “privilege and duty” to pass on craft skills – always looking to the future.

Kye-Yeon admires the tenacity of grass, as it grows, perpetuates and replenishes itself – she has the quality of continuous creative rejuvenation herself.

"Craft is honouring traditional skills + materials – and finding a new way of doing it!"

Kye-Yeon Son

I asked Kye what two tools she would take to a desert island - “my hammer and anvil” was the answer. “I can work anywhere with it. Simply crouching, as is the traditional way to work, I can make.”

We will be seeing Kye-Yeon at Collect in London this coming February – do get in touch if you would like to join us for that trip – it’s going to be fabulous!

And of course back to Nova Scotia in September too.