Junko Mori did a lecture through Coleg Menai and this is what I learned.
How it began.
Junko Mori was born in 1974 Yokohama, Japan and became a metalworker. When she was 10, in a biology lesson, she became obsessed with patterns under microscope. Her hobby became collecting dirty water to look under a microscope. She found an egg hatching one day. She uses pencils and paper to draw patterns. She now also uses water colours to create patterns as well. This progressed to her doing a 3D design course in Tokyo when she was older.
As her art work progressed she found metal the hardest to use so that’s what she chose to use. She chose it because she could push herself to work harder and everything else was easy to use. For a while she couldn’t find where she belongs. She became a welder in a factory but it wasn’t really an art form. However she did learn most of her welding skills. When she had saved enough money she moved to London. She went to study designing at Camberwell College of Arts.
She researched how the brain works when you have dementia after coming across an artists work that dramatically changed because of it. She then researched the link between dementia and depression. She used this as an excuse to her tutors to carry on banging metal and being repetitive within her work. She did it to keep herself mentally stable and to collect results. She found herself calmer when doing metal work. She finds welding exciting.
She started a series in 2001 and currently has 200 pieces. It’s still an ongoing collection.
She has exhibited her work in quite a few galleries but for while nothing sold and she thought she would have to move back to Japan. It did turn around after she saw a red chilli in the market and thought it looked similar to the shapes in her work. She then created a piece called the chilli holder. She collected dried plants to inspire her work. She had 140 different designs in forging . She sold all of them for £50 each. She started to make money and made it through the year.
She then started to use silver to create her vessels. She found certain shapes easier to make with silver. She thinks it’s a fantastic, clean and very forgiving material to work with. Moving on to a new project called The project spring fever ( haiku series), she used 17 different variations of shapes and experimented with different shapes/ textures.
Her next series is was called uncontrollable beauty. She uses patterns from flowers and plants by pressing the dried plants into her work to create a pattern on each petal for a piece of work she created. One of her pieces of work was too heavy and she had to add an internal tree to stop it from collapsing. After this she became interested in the relationship between trees and humans. Shes created studies of trees and plants.
Her new project
Each tree shoot had a pattern. She created a series of pieces for Autumn, Winter, Spring and Summer. She grew a new obsession for exotic plants. She created a chandelier based on exotic plants.
She started using punches to create patterns in her work. She started to design bickers out of silver to drink water and using the punches for the pattern. She created her punches from 25 British Hedgerow designs. Out of that she created 25 seed themed punches. Sometimes her mistakes leads her to new ideas. It’s why she doesn’t use computers to make designs.
3 years ago Junko Mori started a marquee with a wood and metal workshop called Making Little Craft.
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