Snapshot Saturday: a transient house in a temporary home.

If you go to London, and if you go to the Victoria and Albert Museum some time before next February, don’t miss a rather special temporary exhibition I saw there this week.

Find the glass lift, and allow it to sweep you upwards to the sixth floor.  Here, from this light and airy vantage point, you can enjoy views over the museum and beyond.

Contemporary Korean ceramics.  That’s what you’re looking for.  There are glossy ceramic tiles, reinterpreting Korea’s exquisite porcelain from the Joseon dynasty (you can see examples of these down on the first floor).  There are wonderfully lustrous translucent vases, in luminous reds, yellows and blues.  Oh wait ….  they’re carved from soap.

But what drew me back, several times, was this house.

Here’s what its creator Kim Juree has to say about this, and the many houses she has created in the same idiom.

So what you’ll see if you visit won’t be what I saw.  Don’t wait too long.  This temporary structure isn’t long for this world.

If you peer behind the house, you’ll see a few of those vases carved from soap.

This post is a response to this week’s WordPress Photo Challenge: temporary

Author: margaret21

I'm retired and live in North Yorkshire, where I walk , write, volunteer and travel as often as I can.

19 thoughts on “Snapshot Saturday: a transient house in a temporary home.”

  3. Pingback: Temporary: On Offer – What's (in) the picture?

  4. Interesting art. Tangentially, while in A-V spending most of our time languishing in front of the fire with chest infections I was reading Patrick Leigh-Fermor’s “A Time of Gifts” and your fascinating posts from the Black Forest fitted perfectly with my reading. Thank you.

    kathryn.field@btopenworld. com

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  5. very clever artwork and artist… I’ve been thinking how temporary things really are lately. Houses that are homes today, don’t meet the needs of a new generation and they’ll melt away and be replaced, only to be replaced again.

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  6. It’s very intriguing about temporary and transient creations particularly as the work of the Woman’s Hour Craft Prize, Phoebe Cummings, also uses water to slowly erode a clay installation. I notice that both exhibitions are at the V&A at the same time – it’s good to see plenty of interest in the decorative arts at the moment.

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  7. I’ve always been intrigued by artwork that is designed to change and shift and decay. I can’t imagine making that art–I love my finished projects!–but the artists are certainly making a moving statement about our world. I won’t make it to London to see this–glad you posted about it!

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    1. I know! I agree that to labour lovingly and creatively over something, only to have it disappear seems astonishing. Photos aren’t the same. Still, it does bring an extra shade of meaning to their work, and if it’s their creation, who are we to intervene?

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  8. Those soap vases! What gorgeous shapes and colours! The houses are so beautiful! If I was able to make something so lovely I don’t think I’d have the courage to make it impermanent.

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  9. The houses are quite impressive but the vases are superb.

    We once did an art project with salt-dough poppies that were meant to degrade over the course of the year. Top tip – don’t use salt dough for this sort of thing, as it’s a lot more durable than you think. 🙂

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    1. I so wish I’d taken some decent photos of the soap vases. And you’re right about salt dough. I have some Christmas tree decorations my grandchildren made nearly 10 years ago. But I’m glad they’re still going strong.

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  10. Thanks for this post Margaret. I am trying to catch up on my missed reading. How fascinating that this art represents its subject even in its own impermanence. (I like the photo taken through the window too.)

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