Doodles morph into functional objects in Jinil Park's 'Drawing Series'

As artists and designers indulge themselves in the process of 'thinkering', ideas, thoughts and visions assume motley shapes on a piece of paper. Many of the embryonic diagrams develop and evolve into three-dimensional forms, while numerous others reside in dormancy within the pages of a sketchbook. There is often a conspicuous incongruity between an inceptive sketch and its outcome, the visual disparity alluding to the many stages of development and evolution linking them. However, a 'rough', conceptual drawing is equally intriguing to dissect, with its countless strokes varying in intensity, lines broken or smudged, forgotten or unfinished edges, corners and countless nuances. What would follow if these doodles were extricated from pages and injected into reality?

At first glance, South Korean artist Jinil Park's Drawing Series is rather disorienting. The seeming scribbles and sketches are in reality fully functional furniture and lighting designs. While brainstorming and sketching for a new project, Park stumbled upon the concept for the Drawing Series by chance; he observed the pencil strokes on paper more inquisitively, wondering how they could result into intriguing, tangible objects. With this, the artist began to realise sketch-like, wiry silhouettes of chairs, tables, stools and lamp designs for a singular collection. "The Drawing Series is not a user-centred design. It is more like a sculpture, performing a simple function and I believe it is a work that evokes visual appeal," he tells STIR.

Park is an independent artist based in Seoul, South Korea, who primarily employs metal in his practice. He majored in metal art and design from Hongik University and continues to serve as an educator there. In his latest ensemble of furniture and lighting, metal comes to the fore as the medium again. Metallic wires express what lines—linear and distorted—do in a drawing. "They express the designer's feeling, status and emotion," Park explains. "In the matter of design, line plays a very basic but also crucial role because it is an element that generates standard points for both the beginning and the end of any workpiece," he adds.

From his collection of sketches, the artist first picks his favourite ones that can be translated into tangible objects. To achieve this, Park uses wires of varying thicknesses, much like the strokes in a sketch, hammered on different faces with irregular intensity. For Park, this stage of the design process is the most time-intensive, resulting in wires that resemble line drawings, strikingly, almost as if they walked out of one.

The collections of wires created at this stage are then welded at points where they must combine or intersect. Conjunctions of the thin wires are strategically created to ensure that the furniture is capable of bearing human weight that a single wireframe cannot. This, however, is done in a way that abides by the visual semantics of sketches, staying true to the concept of the collection while also materialising 2D drawings into 3D chair designs, table designs and lamps.

Park's series is a playful coming together of the two-dimensional and the three-dimensional, a space where the artist could imagine furniture design as sculptural art pieces. The intention that fuels the Drawing Series is to dabble and experiment with that fusion as much as it is achieving functional entities. Despite the physics and mechanics involved implicitly in a stable piece of furniture or lighting, Park successfully retains the very essence of the collection. Wires—hammered, cut, twisted and welded—echo lines colliding with both aggression and intuition to compose a transient vision; the resulting designs are sketches conjured to life.