A Replication of My Mother's Wedding Blanket

2009
Hand-Shredded Silk Flowers
ACA Gallery | Atlanta, GA

While collecting discarded cemetery silk flowers, Hur realized that her collection of silk flowers matched the colors of her mother's wedding blanket. The wedding blanket is a family heirloom gifted to the artist’s mother by her own. Flower petals are hand-shredded like cremated ashes, an act of mourning and deconstructing. This very first replication of Hur's mother's wedding blanket embodies the artist's desire to reconnect to her mother’s lost youth and story. 

The artist continues to explore in further iterations visualizing unseen narratives and labor. Hur’s early works are largely influenced by works such as Wolfgang Laib's flower pollen, Yoko Ono's Cut Piece, and Felix Gonzalez-Torres' candy spills, infusing personal narratives in poetic forms of installation and performance.

“Freud’s Mourning and Melancholia denotes an idea of innate violence and destructiveness as the essence of desire. In other words, this desire to regain or possess for the sake of gratification validates a rather destructive mourning process as a means to redeem something equivalent to what has been lost. Cutting then becomes a symbolic gesture of mourning in my work. Its residuum reconstructs the losses of the past into equilibrium of landscape and memoir. Going back to reference the effects of childhood traumas, this obsessive gesture of cutting implies behaviors of dissociation. Hours of ‘hand-labor’ provide a substrate for the processing of losses, drawing an appropriate parallel to religious acts of prayer as salvation and sanctification.”

-An excerpt from Hur’s thesis “A Requiem in the Garden”