About

Her story

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

In 2021, she created her studio 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, Candida Höfer typological and serial approaches.

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. _M. Godfrain

Her practice

Ceramics play a central role: clay, worked into slabs, molds, or coils, takes shape to become objects, furniture, or sculptures. Each piece is crafted with precision, bisque-fired at 1050°C or glazed in natural tones, or enhanced with a crackled glaze. But the workshop is not limited to clay. It is also a place for exchange and dialogue between different crafts, and behind each object, particular attention is paid to design, form, and proportion. We regularly collaborate with artisans - cabinetmakers, metalworkers, plasterers, and upholsterers - to bring multidisciplinary projects to life, where each material and each hand enriches the creation. This place is like an invitation to rediscover the beauty of the gesture, the richness of the materials, and the long time it takes to create something by hand.

Custom-made

The studio develops custom-made pieces, created in close collaboration with architects, interior designers, or private clients.

Each commission involves a research process, combining formal experimentation with technical constraints and the functional requirements of the all project. At every stage - from analyzing the context to defining materials, from assembly systems to finishing - special attention is paid to the overall coherence of the object within its environment. The material, whether raw or processed, is chosen for its specific properties and its ability to interact with other architectural elements. It is worked in such a way as to meet specific needs while retaining its own distinct, assertive, and identifiable expression. Thus, each creation asserts its unique and singular character, the result of a rigorous, inventive, and contextualized approach.