Young Jo Oh Brezza, 2012

Artist's book and installation. Solo exhibition. Villa Soranzo, Varallo Pombia, Novara, Italy

A place of memory

The Korean artist-designer Young Jo Oh engages for the first time with the dimension of the artist's book, placing the Brezza series within an exhibition project dedicated to the theme of life cycles, created for the eighteenth-century Villa Soranzo in Varallo Pombia, in the province of Novara.

The artist's book as installation

The installation celebrates the cycles of life, crystallising them in the forms of clay and ceramics. The books are objects that are not read but that describe that becoming and that remaining which is the life of nature, the persistence of our continual changing and returning, as the artist herself writes. The work seems to be crossed by a light breath of wind that suggests the idea of the passing of time and the succession of the seasons, during which the petals change their apparent appearance, renewing themselves cyclically.

The four volumes

The four volumes dedicated to the seasons were designed and made in the artist’s studio and overseen in every stage of production by Daniela Lorenzi. Conceived as containers, cases for ceramic elements, they also contain a photographic record of the installation process and the artist’s correspondence with various interlocutors during the conception phase. Thanks to a shaped hand die-cut, each volume holds one or more ceramic fragments.