HYUNHALIM

Jirisan in My Room (2019) is a textile work that transforms a digital topographic map of Jirisan Mountain into a hand-tufted carpet, bringing a distant landscape into the intimate interior of a room. The contour lines used in the piece were sourced from Google Maps; Jirisan is a mountain I used to hike often in Korea, and while living in the UK I frequently revisited it online through maps and images. By converting those digitally encountered contours—normally read through screens, navigation tools, or remote data—into a soft, physical surface, the work explores how people today often experience place through digital mediation rather than lived presence. The slow, tactile process of tufting reintroduces bodily engagement into an image that was originally flat and impersonal, allowing the mountain to be “felt” rather than merely viewed. In turning geographic data into a domestic object, the piece reflects on longing, displacement, and the ways digital representations shape our emotional relationship to places we cannot easily access.