Mimi Joung | Weather Shaping, Word Making

Mimi Joung presents a new body of work inspired by the weather, the landscape and poetry. 

For Mimi, weather and words shape our lives, one sculpting the land and the cultures of human life and the other moulding our hearts and our minds. Each piece, their colour, their form and their meaning come from a range of poems that have inspired Mimi’s practice as an artist, a maker and a ceramicist. 

“No talking, no talking. The snow is falling. And the wind seems to be blowing backward.” 

Song of an Old Woman in the Cold 

To make her work, Mimi reads and re-reads each poem and then traces and tapes the words in white or coloured porcelain slip, either repeating a short poem again and again, or building the whole form from one longer poem. 

“There are birds on the water, birds in the air. birds on the snags and the conifers, birds flying down to the lake floor, birds on the ice, half a million years old, that is melting away at the foot of the world” 

Birds on the Water, Robert Bringhurst 

Like poetry itself, each piece carries its own uniqueness, firstly through the words themselves, then through the way that Mimi builds the work with her hands and finally through the magic of her kiln, where a unique man made weather shapes the final form.