Joanna Mallin-Davies

She had a quite independent childhood moving from place to place, while her mother started her career in the fashion industry. This situation made her grow up earlier and have maturity uncommon for her age.

While still at Art College, her father died suddenly, affecting her deeply. Living next to a stud farm at Chepstow inspired her and she moved from Victorian strange images to using the image of the horse as the vehicle of expression in her work. Shortly after being graduated she sold her ceramic work successfully, first at the Jonathan Poole Galleries and in the Black Boy Gallery later.

Joanna learnt about Chinese Art when she moved in Asia in 1993. She stayed in an island near Hong Kong and was fascinated by the symbolism and mythology. It was there when she decided to cross over from ceramics to working in bronze. As Joanna said, "As a ceramic sculptor I crossed borders of Art and Craft, but didn't entirely fit in either. Bronze was unmistakably Art. I had always chosen surface effects that emulated patinas, I was also so fed up of ceramic's tendency to break. Bronze was the natural way to go ".

She returned to Britain to study bronze casting and eventually settled down in London. There she was unable to afford to give full attention to her art and took to life modelling and lecturing at arty colleges to make ends meet.

Eventually she decided to dedicate herself full time to her bronzes. A gallery in Hong Kong and one in Singapore exhibit her work. Her latest exhibitions have been in the Raw Gallery, New York, and the Lamont Gallery.

Horses and women are the most recurrent subject matters in her work.

The images she creates, although being very heavy creatures, possess an inner movement that makes them be incredibly light and graceful.

Her women, fecundity goddesses, are unreal. These massive ladies look as if they just had had a long and relaxing bath. Now, in front of the mirror, they admire their bodies and dance, feeling completely confident. Although being enormously fat, in Joanna Mallin-Davies' mind these ladies dance, jump, turn around their bodies or ride a horse, full of life, young and lively, and this is how we see them. In front of such a spectacle we just can surrender and let our eyes go around the figures, following each curve of their bodies. These are images of plenitude, women able to express themselves without complexes, provocating the audience because of their exultancy.

Mallin-Davies works seem to awaken two strong impulses among the audience. Viewing a sculpture like "Belonging", one admires the movement and how the fat lady is dancing while riding the horse. On the other hand, works as "Warrior" or her feminine and dancing nudes raise a strong feeling of touching and caressing the piece, as if it really needed someone to take care of it, to make it feel good.

Her horses are clearly inspired in the ones from the Chinese Tang Dynasty. When a man is riding them, or just sat on them, both figures become one, as if the masculine figure was a strange centaur. The horse is part of him, one cannot make any difference. When appearing ridden by a woman, they always have a clear meaning: women's sexuality and women's desire which is their willing of life. Joanna wrote " The relationship between the figures and the horse changes in its degree of intimacy interaction and importance, and can be interpreted on several levels as the fundamentally sexual relationship between horse and rider, women's relationship with her own sexuality and thus life itself ".

It is very interesting how she gives strength and passion to the characters she sculpts. The simplicity of the curves and lines of the piece contrast with the work of their faces much more detailed. However this is not immediately understood. What catches our eye is the apparent easiness of the figures, but approaching the pieces we discover a face or a hand which is giving as much information as the rest of the figure.

Joanna Mallin-Davies appears as an extraordinary sculptor, full of inspiration and a great technique. Her pieces are not just beautiful shapes. They have an inner strength that makes us guess the artist as a very strong personality, a woman with a life full of experiences though being very young.