Hayne Park (b. 1990), also known under the name Gloryhole, explores the sculptural forms created by the encounter between glass—a material that is simultaneously still and alive—and light. She transforms these into objects that can be used in everyday life.
 
For Park, the defining condition of her work is light that can be “kept close and looked at”—that is, lighting as it relates to human life. She questions the ambiguous identity that lies between art and lighting (between creation and production, art and function), and considers how seemingly opposing values—art and commerce, functionality and artistic value—can coexist in a single work. Through this, she explores how art objects can approach and integrate into daily life.

The meaning behind the name “Gloryhole” is closely tied to Hayne Park’s working process. In glassblowing, a gloryhole refers to a type of furnace—essentially a chamber containing flames heated to around 800 degrees Celsius—used to reheat and shape molten glass.
 
Park found a sense of vitality in the interaction between glass and flame inside the furnace, and this experience led her to focus on recreating that sense of aliveness through artificial light—light that evokes the feeling of being alive.

Hayne Park’s work follows analog and classical craft techniques. She primarily uses traditional glassmaking methods such as glass blowing, where molten glass is gathered on a pipe—often as tall as the artist herself—and shaped by blowing through it, and lampworking, where glass is directly manipulated in an open flame.
 
While rooted in these time-honored methods, Park seeks to uncover contemporary meaning within the medium of glass and integrate that into her practice. Rather than treating glass merely as a material or tool for producing an object, she approaches it as a fine art medium, focusing closely on its inherent physicality and expressive potential.

Hayne Park focuses on the fluidity of glass—its ability to shift between liquid and solid states—particularly when it encounters light and heat. During the glass blowing process, she pays close attention to the way molten glass flows on its own under the force of gravity, or how it naturally takes shape when it contains heat. For Park, this kind of material-driven spontaneity plays a crucial role in shaping the work.
 
Rather than entering the studio with a predetermined form in mind, she allows the moment-to-moment decisions of making, combined with the glass's own movements, to guide the final shape. As a result, one of her key artistic aims is to evoke a sense of motion—even in a solidified, static object. In her work, glass appears to be caught in the midst of transformation, retaining the memory of its previous, animated state.

Furthermore, Hayne Park incorporates the latent movement embedded in the medium of glass into her practice, extending it by connecting this materiality to external narratives and contexts. The inherent qualities of glass—its ability to reflect external light and shift in form depending on the surrounding environment—become, in her work, a kind of screen that mirrors and connects to the outside world.

In her first solo exhibition 《Gloryhole Light Sales》 at OPEN CIRCUIT in 2015, Hayne Park experimented with the idea of materializing the immaterial—light—into lamps, exploring whether it was possible to "sell" light itself. Beginning with her two-person exhibition 《Ghost Shotgun》 at Audio Visual Pavilion in 2019, however, Park began to move beyond lighting, exploring glass works that either were not lamps or lacked any functional purpose altogether.

In the exhibition 《Ghost Shotgun》, Hayne Park collaborated with digital painter Ram Han. Departing from her usual approach of using light and glass together, Park removed the light source from her own works and instead used the light emitted from Ram Han’s illuminated panels as the sole source of illumination. In doing so, Park’s glass works served as screens for Han’s digital paintings, which required a surface for projection.
 
Through this collaboration, Park’s glass-screen and Han’s light-image interacted to produce visual illusions—much like an early film projector—that unfolded a narrative. The resulting imagery continuously shifted depending on the viewer’s arrival time, position, angle, and movement. In this way, the work left behind subtly different scenes in each viewer’s memory, creating a fragmented but personal experience of the piece.

In her exhibition with Ram Han, Hayne Park experimented with how glass could function as a screen. Later, she began creating glass sculptures that took on organic forms. For example, in the 2020 exhibition 《Scale, Scanning》 held at Seongbuk Young Art Space, her works explored the generation of light through the bodies of jellyfish and dinoflagellates.

Among these works, Phosphene Fishtank (2020) externalizes the internal sensory phenomenon called a “phosphene”—the brief perception of light seen when physical stimuli affect the retina while the eyes are closed. In this piece, viewers place a finger on an oxygen saturation monitor positioned in front of the fishtank and hold their breath for a moment. As the oxygen saturation level gradually decreases, it functions like a dimmer switch, slowly illuminating the jellyfish’s body.

Meanwhile, Breathe and Wave (2020) takes the bioluminescent light of dinoflagellates—self-illuminating marine organisms—and transforms it into a light controlled by humans. Dinoflagellates are marine plankton that produce bioluminescence in response to external stimuli. This work visually represents the process by which human breath becomes a wave that affects another organism, triggering the generation of light through that wave.

The artist’s attempt to connect light and glass with life was further developed in My Warm Little Pond (2021–2022). This work was inspired by the 19th-century biologist Charles Darwin’s “warm little pond” hypothesis regarding the origin of life.
 
The hypothesis originates from a letter Darwin wrote to a friend, in which he suggested that life arose “in a warm little pond, with ammonia and phosphates, light, heat, and electricity present.” Hayne Park divided this concept into two spaces—physical and digital—to experiment with the “birth of life” and the “conditions for evolution” (self-replication).

In the virtual environment, the artist showed glass graphics shaped like fragmented DNA strands that move, recombine, and mutate. In the physical space, the “little pond” is represented by an aquarium containing transparent slime, organic-shaped glass pieces, and a DNA sample containing the artist’s genetic information, all intertwined.
 
By releasing the code of life and digital code in both the real and virtual worlds and awaiting unpredictable outcomes, the artist sought to explore the relationship between vitality in the digital and physical realms, as well as the possibilities and limitations within them.

In her first solo exhibition as Hayne Park—not under the name Gloryhole—in 2022, titled 《Diluvial》, the artist presented works in the form of a natural history museum grounded in mythological narrative. The exhibition began with the mythical premise that a god, enraged by human sin, punished humanity with a great flood and then created a new world.
 
Hayne Park sought to connect life and death, past and present, by expressing subterranean fossils—which serve as both evidence and result of this story—in glass. The exhibition’s exploration of fossils and glass was inspired by the 17th-century belief that fossils were not remnants of once-living organisms but minerals grown underground.

The artist overlapped the medium of glass—static yet fluid in its nature, evoking a sense of life—with fossils, which 17th-century people regarded as organic beings. Accordingly, she created fossils out of glass and submerged them in water, setting the scene of a museum struck by a flood, symbolizing a disaster that has passed.
 
This catastrophic scenario the artist crafted is not simply one of complete death and destruction, but rather invites viewers to reconsider what might be able to come back to life within it.

Meanwhile, Hayne Park’s recent work Liquid Veil (2024), installed at Danghyeon Stream in Nowon-gu, explored the “transparency” of water and glass. This piece was inspired by the etymology of the Latin word for “no” (no), which is said to have originated from ancient people’s interpretation of night as seawater flowing onto the land. In the darkness of night, when nothing was visible, they expressed this by saying “I saw only water,” from which the word for water (na) gave rise to the concept of negation—“no.”
 
Through the flowing glass that mimics a river, Park investigated how ancient interpretations of night influenced language development and how transparency can alter our perception. The resulting work combines a light-embraced glass structure with the calm flowing water to create a meditative space that invites contemplation on the complexities of transparency—how light affects the transparency of glass, and how light lingering within the glass can disrupt and transform that transparency.

Hayne Park has continuously connected the materiality of light and glass to our lives, exploring what kinds of connections the surface of glass can make in the contemporary era and what it can promise. Recently, through works centered on glass that link life and the digital realm, she creates environments that encourage viewers to reconsider the nature of matter.
 
Therefore, Hayne Park’s light-glass sculptures do not merely leave an impression of beauty; rather, they invite us to reexamine the narratives and contexts they transmit and contain today, or they evoke a sense of vitality from a materiality that is still yet retains movement, offering warm comfort to people.

 “Let us consider the idea of form being created from liquid. As many myths suggest, a form born from water is akin to birth itself. However, this birth is not accompanied by the notion of ‘molding’ as when a god shapes humans; instead, it is closer to a ‘bringing forth,’ as if the form had always existed within.
 
Though this is purely imaginative, it is clear that forms created from liquid arise from a language and logic different from that of ‘molding.’ I begin with this because glass forms emerge from molten, glowing liquid and evoke the sense that something once alive is born—meaning, at least, that it was moving in that moment.”    (Hayne Park, Artist’s Note)

Hayne Park graduated from the Department of Visual Arts at Korea National University of Arts, where she also completed her master’s degree specializing in glass. Her solo exhibitions include 《Diluvial》 (Seoul Art Space Mullae, Seoul, 2022), 《Gloryhole: Splash-Flash》 (Daelim University Art Hall, Anyang, 2018), and 《Gloryhole Light Sales》 (OPEN CRICUIT, Seoul, 2015).
 
She has also participated in numerous group exhibitions such as 《Mirae/Building》 (Mirae Building, Seoul, 2024), 《Stocker》 (SeMA Bunker, Seoul, 2023), 《The Raw》 (Incheon Art Platform, Incheon, 2022), 《2021 ARTIENCE Daejeon》 (Daejeon Artist House, Daejeon, 2021), 《Ghost Shotgun》 (Audio Visual Pavilion, Seoul, 2019), and the 《Gwangju Design Biennale》 (Gwangju, 2017). Additionally, she was selected as a pre-matched designer for the 《DDP Design Fair》 in 2019.

References

• 박혜인, Hayne Park (Artist Website)
• ARTART, 멈춰있지만 역동적인 살아있는 듯한 유리 작품, 조형작가 박혜인
• 비애티튜드, 타인의 삶에 헌신하는 작업이란
• 박혜인, 고스트 샷건 – 유령 산탄총 이야기 (Hayne Park, Ghost Shotgun Story)
• 한국예술종합학교 융합예술센터 아트콜라이더랩, [서문] 스케일, 스캐닝 (Art Collider Lab, K’ARTS, [Preface] Scale, Scanning)
• 대전예술가의집, [전시작품 소개] 2021 아티언스 대전 (Daejeon Artist House, [Artwork Description] 2021 ARTIENCE Daejeon)
• 문래예술공장, [전시소개] Diluvial (Seoul Art Space Mullae, [Exhibition Overview] Diluvial)
• 021갤러리, [전시소개] AXIS 2021 (021 Gallery, [Exhibition Overview] AXIS 2021)