Making beauty: Mori Junko

This series celebrates the work of living Japanese artists and craftspeople.
Mori Junko employs traditional Japanese metalworking techniques including hand-forging steel with thousands of individually hand-cut nails crafted together to create compelling sculptural forms. Her signature piece is now in the Museum’s Japanese collection.

She takes inspiration from the world around her and uses her imagination to turn metal into organic sculptural forms. She initially worked as a welding assistant in Toma steel factory. In 1998 she came to the UK and enrolled in a silversmithing and metalworking degree at Camberwell College of Art. Now based in the Llyn Peninsula, Wales, she is a transnational artist whose work graphically demonstrates that national boundaries do not contain, but actually inform an artist’s vision. She combines traditional Japanese attention to detail and technique with a European concern for fresh vision and innovation.