Background

A graduate of ENSAD (National School of Decorative Arts), Johanna de Clisson is an accomplished artistic director, designer, and ceramist. After beginning her career as a still-life photographer, she soon transitioned to design and ceramics. In 2021, she opened her studio and launched her label Hiromi, which means “free-spirited beauty” in Japanese. Her creations blend rough-textured chamotte earthenware and sensually tactile cracked enamel, which she sometimes associates with metal or wood in her immaculate studio-laboratory in the north of Paris. 

Signature Style

Playing with paradoxes, Johanna de Clisson simultaneously sculpts objects with brutalist and voluptuous shapes and volumes, as if two extremes were colliding. At the intersection of art and design, she embraces the beauty of constraint and asceticism as her personal guiding principles. Architecture is the primary source of reference for the artist, who cites Ryue Nishizawa, Tadao Ando, and Oscar Niemeyer as tutelary figures who inspire her desire to translate architectural forms into everyday life. She also draws inspiration from the artistic current of German objective photography, particularly Bernd and Hilla Becher’s typological and serial approach. She develops and exhibits her work in a former workshop in the 9th arrondissement of Paris. The space features old wooden ‘parquet’ flooring, white walls, buttercloth curtains, and a few pieces of design furniture, creating a serene atmosphere. Johanna sculpts dressed in a white blouse, a uniform that liberates her spirit and steers her toward the precision of her work. 

 Showstoppers

The light sculpture “object_17,” named “Water Tower” and inspired by the work of the Bechers.