Kye- Yeon Son is a metal artist from Seoul, South Korea. She earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Seoul National University and a Master of Fine Arts in Jewellery Design and Silversmithing from Indiana University. Son now lives and works in Nova Scotia, Canada and is heavily inspired by her local landscape. She has been a Professor in the Craft division at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University since 1995 where she has taught on and helped to develop the Jewellery Design and Silversmithing programme. Son is fascinated by the resistance of metal and her practice is inspired by a drive to better understand its properties and how it can be manipulated. Her work evokes qualities of delicacy and fragility found in nature, and speaks to emotions of resilience, memory, loss, endurance and harmony. She portrays this through the structure, volume and textures of her work.
Son has won numerous awards including the Saidye Bronfman/ Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts, Canada in 2011, the Queen Elizabeth II’s Platinum Jubilee Medal in 2022 and was a finalist of the Loewe Craft Prize in 2019. Son lectures and gives workshops internationally and has exhibited in solo and group shows across Canada, the US and UK, Germany, Japan and Korea, including Innatus Forma at the Saskatchewan Craft Council in 2018, Kye-Yeon Son A Retrospective Jewellery Exhibition at L.A. Pai Gallery Ottawa in 2017 and as part of the group show Colloquy at the Makers Guild in Wales, Cardiff 2022 which celebrated connections between Canada and UK based makers and which she co-organised. She exhibited as part of Collect Open at Collect Fair 2024 in addition to being exhibited by the Craft Alliance Atlantic Gallery.
Her work is in collections including The National Capital Commission Official Residences Crown Collection, Ottawa, Loewe Art Collection, Madrid, Spain, Winnipeg Art Gallery, Winnipeg, Manitoba and the Canadian Museum of History, Gatineau, Quebec. This is the first acquisition of her work for a public collection in the UK.
Innatus Forma grew out of a series of work that Son developed for the Loewe Craft Prize in 2019. In the early 2000’s Son developed a series of work in which she explored feelings of loss and emptiness. She began exploring ways to develop works with a more open structure to express these emotions as well as the passing of time. Up until this point she had worked predominantly in silver but felt limited by what it could offer her for this series. Throughout her practice she has remained fascinated by the properties of metal and enjoys manipulating materials to develop new techniques and ways of working with it. She began exploring other metals and was quickly drawn to the opportunities of steel and worked with steel wire to develop a series of works. She enjoys the juxtapositions of steel as a heavy and strong material versus the light, airy quality she can achieve when working in steel wire.
To create Innatus Forma she constructed a steel framework and then built the sculpture piece by piece with steel wire. This meticulous and time-consuming work required each piece of wire to be carefully welded at the top and bottom to build the form. The resulting sculpture clearly references the trees that she has drawn inspiration from in Canada and Australia. The piece was then heat treated to give subtle hues of blue and brown across the surface and is part of a series of work where Son explores methods of adding colour to her sculptures.
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