Johanna de Clisson

Artistic director, designer and ceramist, Johanna de Clisson is a complete artist. A graduate of ENSAD (National School of Decorative Arts), she began by practicing photography, working with a large-format view camera on still life.

In 2021, she created her label Hiromi, meaning “free-spirited beauty” in Japanese, a research studio specialized in design and ceramics. Her creations blend rough textured chamotte earthenware and sensual touch cracked enamel she sometimes associates with metal or wood in her immaculate studio-laboratory in the north of Paris.

Johanna de Clisson has developed a vocabulary of graphic forms which she explores with HIROMI, a collection of objects such as wall lamps, floor lamps, table lamps and wall modules. Playing with paradoxes, Johanna de Clisson simultaneously sculpts objects with brutalist and voluptuous shapes and volumes, like two extremes colliding.

She signs limited edition furniture (seats, bedside tables, coffee tables) and custom-made light sculptures for special orders from architects. At the frontier between art and design, she claims the beauty of constraint and asceticism as her personal guidelines. Genuine backbone of her research, architecture is the main source of reference for the artist who evokes Ryue Nishizawa, Tadao Ando or Oscar Niemeyer as tutelary figures who guide her in her desire to transcribe architectural forms in everyday life. She also draws inspiration from the artistic current of German objective photography, such as Bernd and Hilla Becher’s typological and serial approach.

It is in a former workshop in the 9th arrondissement of Paris that she develops and exhibits her work. Old wooden ‘parquet’, white walls, buttercloth curtains and a few design pieces compose this silent space. Johanna sculpts dressed in a white blouse, a uniform that frees her spirit and guides her towards the rigor of her work.

Texte: Marie Godfrain

Photo crédit: Adel Slimane Fecih