Steven Junil Park has designed and created a series of one-off rain garments for The Physics Room’s fundraiser. These are made from billboard canvases from Invasive weeds, a 2022 TPR exhibition by Hana Pera Aoake, Wesley John Fourey and Taarn Scott. Each billboard held an extract of a longer text written by Aoake for their then-7-week-old baby. In them, the swamp that lies beneath the present-day Ōtautahi Christchurch city is addressed as a site which remembers, hears, knows, mourns, and rages; each billboard was an assertion of the presence of the land within and before and beyond that of the concreted city. For these garments, Steven Junil Park has transformed the billboard skins into wearable forms, which hold the powerful message of the original text: the earth (soil, swamp, water, weeds) is a living entity to be acknowledged. The tote bags are lined with waxed cotton canvas. The dresses have second hand polyester fabric for the draped parts. The whole suite of pieces were made to use all of the fabric, and produce no waste.

Steven Junil Park is a multidisciplinary artist living and working in Ōtautahi, New Zealand. He works under the name 6x4, producing everything under the label himself: clothing, shoes and accessories. Most of his pieces are oneoffs and often feature recycled, natural-dyed or vintage textiles. For him, the history of the materials and the making processes involved are just as important as is the final outcome. Steven creates his work by being resourceful and using previously existing materials in a world of excess: conscious of the devastating environmental and social impacts of the textile industry. As a Korean-born New Zealander, Steven examines ideas of identity, exploring his own feeling of belonging to neither culture, through clothing.