YooA and Camira

SHE has a background as a provocative political playwright in her native South Korea.  But now YooA Kang, a 43-year-old mother of a young son, aims to become a new force in British textile design and is on a personal mission to boost traditional wool textiles in Yorkshire, the county she has made her home.

All of this is happening while she completes the final year of her degree in textile studies at the University of Huddersfield, long a major centre for the subject.
Born in the Korean city of Gwangu, and educated at university in Seoul, where she studied philosophy, YooA’s first career was as a playwright whose works provoked the then government of South Korea so much that she was forced to quit her studies and was placed on a blacklist.  She met an Englishman working for a Korean company and accompanied him when he returned to his native Heckmondwike, in the heart of the traditional Heavy Woollen area of the West Riding.
The couple married in 2004 and have a son, now six, but later separated.  Initially, YooA felt isolated in her new home. “I spent ten years learning American English in Korea, but when I came here I found I just couldn’t speak to anyone, not even in a shop.  I was in a shell for two years.”...