Prayer Sculpture

On special occasions such as the "sol"(lunar New Year), "chuseok"(lunar Thanksgiving), "dol"(a child's first birthday), and "hwangap" (60th birthday), Korean women made rice-cakes. On these joyous occasions, rice, the most precious grain that was carefully saved and stored, was used abundantly. The rice-cakes were decorated using special wooden molds of various themes and designs, including characters such as "su" denoting longevity, water lilies and bats - all traditional symbols of good fortunes. The rice-cake molds thus embodied the love and care, devotion and prayer of the women who prepared them. They captured a woman's wishes for the health of her husband and children as she marked their birthdays, her ardent prayer as she sent her son off on a long and often hazardous journey to Seoul to take the civil-service examination to bring honor to the family, and her heartbreak as she sent off her daughter who was getting marked and moving to a far-away place, perhaps never to meet again as the social custom of old dictated. As I discovered the beauty of the rice cake molds as well as the love and devotion that they embodied, I wished to recreate them for an age in which such practices as well as the archetypal Korean "soul" are becoming distant memories.