Amplifier Birch Coil (after Cheolyu Kim)

Cheolyu Kim has spoken about his childhood fascination with flight – ‘whether through seeds, leaves, insects, birds, balloons, planes, or even UFOs’ – and the abiding influence, upon his drawing practice, of growing up on the South Korean border and experimenting with a Spirograph set. This poem echoes Kim’s moiré spirals and dream-like architectures, which he often renders directly onto birch wood. Anchored in the Fibonacci sequence, my poem links spiral forms with the transduction coils fundamental to amplifiers; and to the inner ear, in which tiny cochlear bones also work to amplify sound. I reimagine the heartwood of a birch tree as a coil that conducts the earth’s music, while responding to philosophies of sonic and spatial perception embodied in the work of South Korean artist Lee Ufan and Russian poet Arkadii Dragomoschenko.