Hanna Shim | Bubble soft sculptures

Installation view featuring: Hanna Shim, Bubble Bubble and Bubble, 2021, mixed fabrics, linen, hand-embroidery. Photo: John Paul Pochin.

Hanna Shim has created work that reveals and revels in the awkward distance that exists between us.

Her Bubble soft sculptures are faces that are joined together and pulling apart in ways that could represent the internal divide that exists between our public and private selves, or representative of our inability to connect in genuine ways to each other in a global culture formed through social media, conformity and surface-level communication. The materiality of the work serves as an amusing contrast to the critique embedded in the work. The work is soft, it invites a sense of comfort, but it was also made with needles. In a world in which we can connect to each other across oceans, the divides between us have never felt vaster, but with Bubble and Bubble, Bubble Hanna is not condemning the reality of uncomfortable social relationships, they have always existed and she is making us achingly aware of them.

Artist Profile

Hanna Shim is an Auckland-based artist, born in Seoul, Korea and raised in New Zealand.

Shim identifies herself as a maker, her practice contains certain qualities of playfulness and childishness both in her processes and visual outcome. It involves a mode of condensation and hybridisation of contradicted imageries, objects and stories. Shim completed Elam School of Fine Arts BFA in 2012 at the University of Auckland and has continued into MFA.