And my water returns to that of the great river
Steven Park

For Steven Park, working materials by hand reveals a language of expression beyond the spoken and written word. In craft he finds his ‘mother tongue’ and a means of forging connection and community. Here, he reflects on how this philosophy has unfolded through the stages of his life, and urges us all to resist estrangement from the act of making.

I am going to write about my personal experience. I would like to share some reflections about craft and community. I’m not a researcher or a writer but what I have to offer is the tacit knowledge gained through working with my hands for all of my adult life. I have been privileged enough to pursue a career as an artist and designer where I can spend my time making things according to my own desires and interests. This is not a very common position to be in, but, whether or not you have had similar experiences, I hope that you’ll find something that connects with you, as I believe these reflections speak to the human experience, rather than just my own.

I was born in Seoul, South Korea. Our family immigrated to Ōtautahi Christchurch in 1993, when I was six months old. At the time there weren’t many Korean families living here, so we tended to stick together. I have very fond memories of gatherings of families, often centred around the Korean church we attended. As an adult I came to realise that this was quite a special experience, growing up in a super-tight-knit community of people where belonging was an unquestioned fact. I think about what it must have been like for my parents coming here to give my brother and me a better life. They left their families and didn’t speak a lot of English, so they had to learn pretty quickly. I imagine that this community provided more than just friendship. When you are in a new place, you need to find your people and hold them close, as you rely on each other for resources, information, knowledge, comfort and a feeling of being at home. I think back on this and wonder how much it might have coloured my understanding of the world and the meaning of human connection.

I am no longer a part of the church and don’t have strong ties to that community, but with some distance I can see a clear contrast between the texture of interpersonal connections inside such a collective group and outside of it. Connections are fleeting and scattered in a society where individualism is promoted as the greatest freedom, almost a virtue, over collectivism and community. In the chasm between these two vastly different ways of being, I found myself adrift like a rogue star, trying to keep things in my orbit but failing. I don’t look back with nostalgia — I’m sure our community was not without its problems — instead I look back to understand how we can experience moments of belonging as we navigate the modern world as individuals.

The belonging I grew up in was based in Christianity and our shared Korean culture. Now, at the beginning of my thirties (around the same age my parents moved to Aotearoa), I wonder what frameworks we can find in order to experience togetherness and connection without conditions — where the diversity of modern societies can be embraced in arms that uplift rather than erase the unique cultural, emotional, social, spiritual, physical and creative dimensions of individuals. I don’t know if this is a puzzle that can ever be solved, but I am trying to understand and structure my life in relation to this question.

I approach this puzzle through the practice of craft, through making things with my hands. Throughout history, crafts and other art forms have been a force for connection. They have allowed us to survive by making practical things, but beyond that they have shaped and strengthened the bonds that unite us with each other and the world around us. They have reinforced our cultural identities, fostered empathy through shared visual language, created frames for developing ritual and spiritual purpose, and allowed us to understand our relationship to the natural world through the raw materials we use. They come with their own frameworks of how to build shared meaning, with protocols and processes that guide the hands, minds, hearts and souls of those who engage with them.

We all come from histories of craft, before colonisation, industrialisation and modernisation wiped our memories of the spiritual, localised and ancestral stories we told through the work of our hands, the songs of our voices, the dances of our bodies, the food of our homes, and the myths of our cultures. If we reach back into our pasts we see crafts and arts that speak to the places that we came from; but reaching further back, into archaeological time, we see that they are some of the defining characteristics of our species. I believe that there is a lot to gain from engaging in crafts and other art forms, not for the sake of producing an outcome, but for the knowledge that they can give us through the act of doing them: knowledge about our connection to the past, to each other and to ourselves, and about how we can look ahead to the future with hope.

While growing up, my experiences of visibility were largely negative, I never saw any positive or complex representations of Asianness, only caricatures and stereotypes. I just wanted to be a person, but my identity was always imposed upon me: before I was a person, I was Asian. I felt deeply uncomfortable in my own skin; I was very self-conscious about the body I was born into and was not kind to it. This body is a testament to all of the lives that came before me, to all the stories and spirits that flow through my blood, but I could not see this. As an adult, I reflect on how I absorbed the narratives of the dominant culture, internalising its racism and shame. I wonder if this discomfort with my own body was why I was so drawn to clothing as a medium that inherently deals with questions of identity through its proximity to skin and its tracing of the human form.

I was excited by the idea that I could have agency over my representation and tell my own story through dress. Of course, at the beginning this came across in clumsy teenage ways (during peak Evanescence and Linkin Park era), when I would try on existing identities to feel like a part of a larger aesthetic narrative. My first interactions with clothing were through fast fashion. It just appeared in shops at a low cost and I never really thought beyond that, about how someone somewhere was sewing every stitch. Clothing that spoke to me was very difficult to find in those shops. Op shopping and altering became a way for me to wear the clothing that I liked. I began to unravel the idea that clothing is a complete text, set in stone and unable to be altered once purchased. Only through learning to sew did I start to understand the work and skill that goes into making a garment. As I became more confident with the sewing machine, I eventually started making garments from scratch. Very quickly, the low cost of fast fashion became impossible to reconcile with the time it takes to make, or even alter, a garment by hand. The seemingly limitless options available in stores presented only an illusion of choice, recycling the same handful of Western archetypes and offering a very narrow image of identity, with no representation for my experience or that of other minority groups or body types. Personalising garments to make them feel more like me broke down those prescriptive structures. As I got better at sewing I found strength and empowerment in my growing ability to have a strong voice through what I wore, rather than acquiescing to the identities that were available off the rack.

I began to unravel the idea that clothing is a complete text, set in stone and unable to be altered once purchased.

As I started to experiment with new forms of expression, I quickly recognised that traditional Korean clothing (hanbok) could not fully speak to my experience either: I sat somewhere in the middle, in the negative space between cultures, and by sewing I was able to create a language of dress that felt like my own. I was able to experience the daily act of dressing as a daily act of becoming. This allowed me to have control over my own visibility, to celebrate my embodiment on my own terms rather than wanting to feel invisible. I felt powerful in covering myself in layers and layers of black, making myself a wardrobe with heavy references to traditional East Asian clothing but still sitting squarely in the in-between space I inhabited. I was rigid and strict in how I dressed, with silent codes and rules that allowed me to have control where I didn’t before.

In my mid-teens I decided that I no longer believed and did not want to be a part of the church. This did not mean that I was starting from a blank slate: there was a gap left in my psychology and spirit where once there was God. I needed a new story to believe in. In my late teens I found this story: I began to see myself as an island, an isolated being trapped in my subjectivity, never able to truly share anything with another due to the inadequacies of human expression. This was reflected in the ways I dressed. I relished the concealment of my skin: the layers of black were like armour protecting me from the gaze of the world, which I had come to think of as unkind. It made me feel alone but safe. At the time I naively thought that this strict dress code would define me for the rest of my life. However, as I grew older and my relationship to my body changed, so too did my sense of dress; this era had served its purpose and so too had the story. I ended the story of myself as an island and started to open myself up, seeing beauty and vitality in the joy and vulnerability of interconnectedness.

I started making work under the name 6×4 in my second year at Elam,¹ after becoming disillusioned with the school’s heavy focus on conceptual art. I gave up art making and decided to focus on making clothing and functional objects. 6×4 was a framework under which I could do this within Elam and I dedicated myself to learning lots of practical skills with the highly skilled technicians in the workshops. I named 6×4 after the dimensions of the labels I would sew onto the insides of the garments I made: an unmarked piece of fabric, the same as that of the garment, measuring 6cm × 4cm, sewn in where a branded clothing label would usually be. Through this I wanted to acknowledge that the material is just as important, if not more important, than my intention as a designer. I wanted to acknowledge the material as the label rather than use my own name. I still approach making in the same way, as a conversation between maker and material, asking the material what it wants to become rather than imposing my own voice.

This connection with the materials I was working with pulled me into the next part of my story. Through the tacit knowledge that seeped into my being while I engaged in the act of making, I was able to address and undo some of my internalised discomforts in my late twenties. In transforming materials from one state to another, I realised that I was able to transform myself. This desire for expression through a material outside of my body became my mother tongue, the language where I feel I am able to most truthfully speak to my experience and understand the world. It is a way for me to commune with parts of myself that I can’t access otherwise, opening a path for me to understand my Korean heritage and my place in Aotearoa as tangata Tiriti.

As I shed the story that I was an island, I started to tell a different one: our separation as individuals is an illusion and we are deeply interconnected — not just to other humans but to all life, matter, and the intangible beyond space and time. If we lean into seeing ourselves as a nexus of various connections, we can start to feel the boundaries of our perceived selfhood dissolve and the world around us come alive.

This is by no means a new or original story, it is one of the oldest in the book, but it has faded from our memories. At first I was at a loss as to how I could truly believe and enact this in my daily life after so many years trying to sustain myself as a solitary unit. I held the story in my mind like a guiding light, but I wasn’t sure how I could feel it in my heart. The world around me had been quite supportive of the idea that I was an island, but I struggled to find personal and non-religious frameworks through which I could see myself as a deeply interconnected being. I knew that it was possible to feel my invisible roots intertwined with others, as I had grown up with the nourishment of such a network — but now I needed to find one for myself as an adult.

I made close friendships centred around various art forms, and it was these friendships that offered the frameworks I was seeking.

After studying in Tāmaki and briefly living overseas, I returned to Ōtautahi to live. I continued to make clothing under the name 6×4 and over the years I made close friendships centred around various art forms, and it was these friendships that offered the frameworks I was seeking. I began to melt the walls that I had fortified over many years, allowing in the vulnerability that begets connection. I found joy and celebration of my embodiment through my friendships with dancers. I felt the malleability and playfulness of interaction through my friendships with theatre makers. I was shown new depths of meaning in my daily meals through friends who tell stories through food. They brought me into their worlds and I was able to witness them speaking so fluently in their own unique languages of expression. In those moments I fell in love with them all over again as I understood the world through their eyes and saw their truest selves. Naturally our practices started to influence each other, we shared our hearts, ideas and resources as we all acknowledged that our talents do not belong to us; the knowledge, skill and wisdom of our art forms are not our own. They are the tools passed down to us that help us connect our own water to that of the great river.

In 2022 I released a perfume called CAVE that I developed with Nathan Taare of Of Body. I had been thinking about it for a long time and the development process spanned a few years. I wanted to create a scent that evoked the symbol of the cave where we first stirred the embers of consciousness, where we first depicted our realities on the damp stone walls and sang songs in the still air — experiences of connection that predate the spoken word. I wanted to shoot a film as the campaign for this project, so I made a costume to envelop four people. I developed an improvised choral score for myself and my friends Olivia McGregor, Kosta Bogoievski and Josie Archer, based around a visualisation of blowing on the embers of a fire to bring it to life, then singing it to a roaring flame.

Shoot day was an event with lots of friends involved. We trekked out to a cave down the side of a cliff on Awaroa (Godley Head) with a picnic, cameras and the costume. Later I made the lids for the bottles out of stone from the peninsula and the finished perfume came with a poem, photos from shoot day, and a lathe-embossed record of our singing. The experience of making this perfume was long and involved many friends,² and although it was something that I initiated I could not have done it alone and did not think of it as my own. From the outside it may look like a product, but to me, and hopefully to those involved, it was a testament to that period in our lives. The perfume was a vessel for our shared experience; its creation pooled our various skills and knowledge, allowing us to be together in new ways.

As we shared our lives and practices, we nourished our friendships and they nourished us in return. I was transformed by seeing my friends perform their hearts’ work. I visited their studios, where we would talk for hours. I learned about the ideas and concerns that were unique to different art forms. I felt my voice melt into the shared song. I danced with friends and strangers at concerts, where once I would have just hung in the back, locked in my body and its insecurities. I did not set out with the intention of learning, understanding or doing any of these things. They just bled into my life, through the closeness of friendship and the act of doing. Through these art forms our bonds became very strong. I felt the intangible tendrils of my being become inextricably linked to others, and I found myself a firm believer in the story of interconnectedness. Through these arts, these threads of meaning making, I was able to feel it through my body, heart and spirit.

As we shared our lives and practices, we nourished our friendships and they nourished us in return.

Craft and other art forms are often presented as hobbies or luxuries, auxiliary to everyday life, but I argue that they are crucial to a rich and meaningful life of human dignity. The institutional lenses that dominate the cultural narrative around the arts, which descend from colonial power structures, often engender barriers to entry in terms of access or cost. The creation of community through creative expression should not be something we have to pay for: it cannot be gate-kept from us, for it comes from within us. Throughout history I see that these art forms have been fundamental vessels for a shared sense of belonging: binding our societies together, tying us to our pasts, and guiding us towards the future. They have transmitted cultural knowledge across time through collective participation, expressing our identity through shared visual language. They have provided frameworks for rituals and rites of passage, allowing us to transition through stages of our lives and as members of society. Through the processing and use of raw materials, we have been connected to the natural cycles of our local environments, tying us to a sense of place through the very objects we have made and used.

It has always been important to me that my practice doesn’t follow the fashion industry’s extractive, destructive and wasteful path,³ and this has led me to seek out the stories of the materials I work with. Earlier this year I connected with local linen and indigo grower Gina Russell, of Growing Textiles.⁴ I helped with their first indigo harvest and took some home for my own use. I was also given some retted and dried linen to process into fibre. This was my first time connecting with materials directly from the soil and it was a transformative experience. Using these materials, grown with love and care for wider systems, made me see my connection to place and to others in a new light. I’d worked with powdered indigo pigment before, but beginning a relationship with the living plant has been a much more expansive and fulfilling experience, allowing me to experiment with how I can honour different parts of the plant in various applications.

Working with these raw materials has deepened my practice and allowed it to be rooted in a sense of place in a way that bought, or even second-hand, materials could not. They are loaded with meaning: telling the story of the land, the growers, the traditions of the materials, and the connections I made through them. As I navigate my place in Aotearoa as tangata Tiriti of colour, I have found that grounding this in my practice has been deeply important. Discussions of decoloniality and the history of our country are often very intellectual, existing in the head, but I have learnt so much through my hands and the crafts of those who were steeped in this whenua long before tauiwi. It has given me a lot of perspective on the social, cultural and spiritual devastation caused by the theft of land. In the same way that making allows me to cultivate a deeper belief in the story of interconnectedness, raw materials from the land allow me to have a deeper understanding of place as tangata Tiriti and as a Korean person. To reflect on where I come from, those who came before me, but also where I hope to go in the future.

When materials are commodified, they are severed from their birthplace and the context of their relationships, they become nothing more than their physical qualities. This mindset perpetuates an unbalanced relationship with the resources available on this planet, casting them as commodities to be extracted without regard for the life force they contain, the meaning of where they come from and the systems they belong to. Though I am not tangata whenua, I have had the privilege of sharing spaces and conversations about craft with toi Māori artists. Through these relationships I have learnt, and continue to learn, how the significance of material provenance is foundational and inherent to te ao Māori through whakapapa. I am continuously grateful to have been imparted such precious wisdom, as it helps me deepen my growing understanding of the relationship that tangata whenua have with this land. It gives me guidance on how I can honour these ideas through my own practice and support the Tino Rangatiratanga of Māori, who are intrinsically tied to the whenua. In a world that demands constant speed and growth, I think we can all benefit from finding moments to align with our environment, with the earth that gives us life and from which we are inseparable. Through the seasonality of materials I feel grounded in these natural cycles, which do not obey the clock but keep pace with the stars instead. The materials we use are more than just resources to be exploited, they tie us into the rich cultural histories and ancestral knowledge that make our crafts so significant. We tell our stories through the work of our hands.

I have often heard people say: I can’t sing, I can’t sew, I can’t dance. But to whom do these activities belong? They belong to us.

How sad and cruel that so often our art forms are presented as an absurd commodity and many people feel alienated by them. I have often heard people say: I can’t sing, I can’t sew, I can’t dance. But to whom do these activities belong? They belong to us. Where once they were an unquestioned part of our interconnectivity, we now outsource them to corporations and production chains and feel no ownership over them. It is easy to feel adrift and alone when we swim in a sea of faceless objects made by unknown hands, from unknown materials, from unknown places — reflecting the cold uniformity of industrialism that destroys our planet and our communities. We are alienated from the ability to ground ourselves in the places we live, we are alienated from our ability to make things with our hands, we are alienated from ourselves. If we are able to take back this ownership, to take back the work of our hands, I think we can find a richer way to be in the world and be with each other.

There are many kinds of human knowledge, ranging from emotional to spiritual, social and cultural, though often we find that intellectual knowledge is prized above all else. There is also knowledge to be gained in the body, through making and doing. We cannot gain the same nourishment as mere spectators. We don’t have to be professional on a stage, in a theatre, in a concert hall or in a gallery, it can be in small ways, with friends, or alone. The power comes from doing these things and trusting that their nutrients will reach our roots. When we come together to do this in unison, we can build connections and feel our threads weave into a larger fabric. When I was unsure of how to have faith in the story of my connection to all things, it was only through the embodied act of making that I could fully believe. This is why it is important for us to have the agency to do these things ourselves, to experience them in our bodies.

I don’t look at these traditional frameworks with a desire to return. I am not advocating for everyone to leave society and go start a new life as a cottagecore homesteader on TikTok. The nature of our communities and our arts have changed irrevocably and we must be careful not to fetishise the past. Our societies are now so much bigger, more complex and multicultural. My hope is that a deeper understanding of the role that craft and the arts have played in the past will allow us to draw on their fundamentally beneficial functions — offering a secular, but still spiritual, framework for people of all backgrounds and cultures to engage in, in our modern context.

I myself am a product of the movement of people and ideas. My practice was born from an inner tumult as I struggled to understand my place in the world, but through this I have learnt how deeply we need each other and how powerfully we can connect to each other through the arts. We are makers, singers, dancers, storytellers, painters, musicians, performers, poets all. Making has taught me that we are not alive just to give our best years to companies that don’t care about us or the planet, trying to earn enough money so that we can hope for a retirement that may not even come. I refuse to believe that the joy, meaning, healing and togetherness we can experience through shared meaning-making should be a luxury reserved for those who can afford the time and money. I hope for a future where the systems we are encouraged to accept as normal do not continue exploiting the majority of people only to benefit the very few.

We are makers, singers, dancers, storytellers, painters, musicians, performers, poets all.

Making work is not about showing in a gallery, for me. It has always been something that I have needed to do rather than wanted to do. I have worked as a designer and artist for a long time, which means working alone in a studio for the majority of my week. In the past few years I began to really question why I make work when there are other urgent issues in the world — what is it that I can offer? After the events of 7 October 2023, and with the recent attacks on te ao Māori by the coalition government elected in 2023, I have felt an urgency to use my voice as a maker to address these issues. During a time when it is easy to feel powerless — like we are a lonely voice screaming against the grinding engines of oppression — I find that we can draw so much strength and build solidarity through craft.⁵ For craft does not speak with a single voice: these practices speak through us with the strength and power of all those who came before us and the life force of the materials we use.

Every day I am grateful to be able to engage in a practice that allows me to examine and understand my own experience and place in the world. However, doing this in a capitalist context means that I need to find ways to make a living from what I do. When every part of our lives and our culture has been commodified, it is our first instinct to try and think about a final outcome: whether it is a finished garment, or an exhibition in a gallery. But this outcome-oriented thinking can kill a lot of the magic and discovery that is so vital to making. This is not an easy negotiation; I don’t know if it’s possible to find a healthy balance between making as a creative act and making as a commercial act. I recognise with gratitude that I have only been able to pursue this career because I grew up in a financially stable middle-class family where we all had our health and loving support. I would guess that most people struggle to make a living from the arts, but we do it despite the difficulties because we can experience truly transcendent moments of togetherness through them. The reason we engage in the arts, the reason we have always done so, is to create shared stories through the myriad rich languages of expression that we have at our disposal as humans — engaging in art not to produce a saleable unit, but for the transformative act of doing and how that can bind us to each other.

For craft does not speak with a single voice: these practices speak through us with the strength and power of all those who came before us and the life force of the materials we use.

As we become distanced from feeling ownership over all of these modes of expression, we have had to accept the identities that are given to us, but I hope that we can be empowered to tell our own stories about who we are through these innately human practices — the embodied act of making with our hands, through finding community theatre, choir, sewing, painting, drawing, dancing, writing, reading groups. I hope that we can experience moments of dignity and true connection, and make sense of the place we find ourselves as individuals, as communities, and as societies.

I leave you with this jogakbo (a traditional Korean hand-sewn patchwork) I made for some very dear friends, Josie and Kosta, who moved away from Aotearoa earlier this year. Before they left I wrote them each a song and wrapped it in this jogakbo to take away with them. When the songs are played in unison they intertwine to create new rhythms and harmonies. Words failed to articulate everything our friendship had meant to me over the years, so, unsure of how to process my feelings around them leaving, I turned to other forms of expression: to music and textiles. My adult years have been a journey of developing a personal language of expression through craft as a way to process and express what I cannot otherwise: a way for me to commune with myself and the intangible. This language has also become a framework through which I am able to connect with others and deepen my existing friendships in ways that I didn’t realise were possible. I made this jogakbo to tell the story of our friendship, how our separate lives, like these small scraps of fabric, have become intertwined. We hold our stories in our own hands, no matter how much external forces might insist that they are the keepers of human culture. These things have always belonged to the people and they will continue to do so.

These things have always belonged to the people and they will continue to do so.