Forged ArtworksWith skills learnt in a Tokyo steel mill, refined in a London college and perfected in a Welsh pig shed, Junko Mori is one of a kind.

North Wales can feel like the Wild West. A forgotten land, two hours from any motorway, microclimatic weather flicking from misty rain to blue sky as the tides turn. Decrepit 70s petrol stations, staffed by strong women, blur into the landscape; roads twist and narrow, as we jostle for highway space with the omnipresent Ifor Williams trailer before being overtaken by a rough-looking, straight-piped Subaru with roll cage.

Across the sea, Ynys Môn peeks from the gloom. Angles of mountains and sea appear sporadically suddenly from the gloom.

We’re heading down the Llyn Peninsula, the north side, the best side, away from the buzz of jet skis and the weekend crowd. Home to Junko Mori – world class sculptor and artist – born and raised in Yokohama, Japan, now living in North West Wales and creating her world – renowned artistic pieces from steel and silver in her workshop.

And what work. Thousands of meticulously hand-beaten metal pieces TIG-welded together to form incredible, natural-looking organic structures from the fire and hammers of the workshop. Each one formed from an idea that only exists in Junko’s mind, rather than a drawing to be followed.

After making the individual components, she starts to weld them together, with no real idea of how the object will develop, repeating the welding, adding to the shape, building up the profile until, well, in her words, ‘I don’t know how it’s going to build up, I don’t know how it’s going to grow, and then, when I find a beautiful moment, I finish. There is no mould or plan, it’s all just the individual leaves welded together. It’s very strange to explain, but that’s how I work.’

Learn The Ropes

Junko’s workshop, built by her husband, Welsh-born craftsman John Egan, is half-a-world away from the steel mills of Tokyo where she spent a year learning the techniques of production, fabrication and welding. She was one woman in a company of men, hiding under a headscarf and overalls. To blend in? ‘I never intended not to stand out, it was just very practical, and I was quite naturally a very boyish kinda girl. Very short hair, massive fan of heavy metal, which is just how I am,’ Junko laughs. It was a natural progression that had begun as a small child, playing in her dad’s shed, crafting things from sticky tape, wood and cardboard. Dad, a JVC engineer who worked on the development of the VHS recorder, was surprised but delighted his daughter and not his sons would spend time meddling with stuff in the outhouse.

Projects ranged from mechanical objects to the nature in the garden at their house. Invasive plants, emerging shoots, embryonic aquatic animals, organic structures. A fascination with both nature and making. Aged ten she stuck some pond water under a microscope and was instantly fascinated with the previously-hidden organic world she saw. Cells growing, splitting, joining, changing, propagating. A mass of simple-looking elements making a structure, whether a leaf, feather or pond scum, multiplying, dividing, seemingly growing infinitely.

Establish A Base

‘Bodyboarding,’ says Junko. Bodyboarding? ‘It’s why we first came to Wales.’ After meeting her partner, now of 15 years, at a group show in Manchester, the pair escaped the city for breaks in John’s native Wales, until they stumbled upon a run-down cottage with a pig shed and land, remote, hidden, but just five minutes from the best beach you’ve never heard of. Her work is, as with most artists, an amalgam of her history, her location and her artistic mind. It’s as far away from industrial Tokyo as you can imagine, but it’s right and it’s home.

‘Wales is a unique country with a very strong identity. The more I live here, the more I get interested. I had to do the test called “Life in the UK” to apply for my artist visa, and learnt the UK’s ratio of population, England 84%, Scotland 8%, Wales 5%, Northern Ireland 3%. Technically, Wales is minor country, thus culturally minor. However, I am always drawn to unique minority groups in anything, like food, music, art, in nature, etc. I love odd things, and it’s human nature to get drawn to a single red poppy in the large green field. I love this potential of a small country to show their strong identity and offer a unique culture to the visitors.’

Uncontrollable Beauty

A metal-bashing craft practice was never going to work in the yard of suburban Manchester semi, and so Junko and John escaped Cottonopolis, shipping out their welding benches and carpentry gear to start a new life out west. Since their move, Junko’s career has gone worldwide, with pieces now held in national museum collections across the world. Her objects have evolved from mild steel to fine silver, with assistants employed to help with the hand forging of the thousands of constituent parts, but still all hand-welded by Junko herself. The result are structures that seemingly form themselves from her meditative, repetitive state.

She’s described her work as ‘Uncontrollable Beauty’– the incredibly soft organic shapes, made with the force of hammer and the fire of welding torch. ‘Honest, robust bashing of metal’ is what her agent calls it. It’s a practice she’s followed since the first free-form creation she made when given an open brief in the third year of her 3D Design course at Musashino Art University in Tokyo. It was there, in 1997, that she specialised in blacksmithing and metalworking. ‘I found metal to be the hardest [to work with], but I always loved the challenge.

Anything that was easy did not interest me, so I decided I would try and tackle this hard material.’
Cutting up short lengths of various box-section pipe and welding it together into her highly distinctive organic structures, she instantly recognised the direction she had to go in. ‘It was like an elaborate organic phenomenon.’

Despite the complexity of the finished pieces, the fact that Junko’s work is so simple is what allows her to thrive in her almost off-grid location. So long as she’s got gas for the blowtorch and forge, and electricity for the welder, it’s a relatively simple process to hit hammer to anvil and shape those pieces of metal to build the components that come together to form the work. Textural detail on the individual pieces is created using a collection of car-boot-sale hammers, individually carved and shaped to deboss and distort in a certain way. Former Welsh garage mechanic’s hammer, given a second life as an artist’s tool – an artist nearly 6000 miles from her birthplace. ‘Such simple techniques can create the complicated look of work,’ she says. Simple techniques, but hours of detail and focus.

Few graduating artists can make a living at their work, despite their proficiency. Which ones are favoured by the fortune of being in the right place at the right time can be often seen to be a lottery (or nepotism). But Junko struck lucky early. Fabrication welding hadn’t paid too well, but she managed to save enough money to come to the UK to study at Camberwell College of Arts. After being interviewed by highly respected metal craftsman Hans Stofer, she was offered a place on their degree course, providing she learnt enough English to pass a language exam within six months of the course starting.

Liverpool Calling

Equipped with a year’s worth of high-quality metalworking skills, and experience from working with a variety of metals, welding techniques and objects ‘from huge ceremonial temple gates to tiny racing bicycle parts’, the degree course helped refine and shape her practice. At the end of the degree she was planning to return to Japan, but her tutor suggested that there could be some funding to help her stay in the UK, developing her craft further, through the Craft Council’s Next Move scheme in 2001. That in turn led to a period moving from purely working in mild steel to beginning to experiment in silver, thanks to a residency at Liverpool’s Hope University, and silversmith Chris Knight. This new work was displayed alongside her spiky steel structures at the Chelsea Art Show, where, ten minutes before opening time, someone was checking out the pieces and seemed very interested. ‘“That one, that one, that one, that one. Can you put the red sticker on for me?” And then he walked off. I thought it was the security guard teasing me.’ Junko states.

Adrian Sassoon was not a security guard, but one of the foremost collectors and agents for craft-based artists in the world. Exhibitions have been created from his personal collections. He knows his stuff. Likes and Shares are all very good. Instagram tags are cute. But putting your own money down to back an artist is what makes a difference. He got his chequebook out, bought the objects and then followed that up with an offer to be Junko’s agent and bring her work to the attention of a wider audience. It’s a relationship that has seen her work be bought worldwide.

A Litre of Spikes

If you go on the internet and read about TIG welding, the first thing that comes up is that it’s a ‘manual welding process that uses a non-consumable tungsten electrode, an inert or semi-inert gas mixture, and a separate filler material’. But from that mechanical process, in the heat of the gas and electric arc, melting metal is where Junko finds her peace and her art.

‘Once I was called a cultural hybrid, also in craft, design and art hybrid, too. It is very true as I have been trained in craft course, but somehow the core of my conceptual development has been influenced by fine art or even science. But in Japan, crafts training is all about efficiency and accuracy. When I was in Liverpool, I questioned the speed of making a lot. For example, in a business lecture, the mentor said, “Calculate your labour, how long it took to make, plus expenses such as materials and studio rent, and profit, then you get your maker’s price.”

‘But if your speed of making is so slow, how do you justify this? So, I spent a whole week determining how quickly I can forge enough 5mm square spikes to fill a one-litre yoghurt tub. In the beginning, it took me three whole days. Then I made a few adjustments, like setting up the position of anvil and forge closer, placing rods in order, what number of rods is best to do forging in one go, and so on. At the end of the week, I managed to forge one litre per day. Depending on the scale, I get about 400 spikes per litre, and in a large sculpture I need ten litres, so 4000 spikes. Though, obviously, it is depending on the size of components. Smallest components are 3mm petals, which will be ten times more than that, 40,000 petals! The ring piece at British Museum will be very similar to that.’

Now, with two young tri-lingual children (Japanese, Welsh, English) and her family embedded in the local community thanks to her arts outreach projects, does a Japanese welder get called on for more mundane repairs in the wilds of west Wales?

‘Oh, I have welded many things, in fact I recently welded a part of tractor, made [son] Denis’s go-kart, fixed a gate… I actually get excited about those little jobs. Though, I would like to insist that I hate people who ask casually for a “freebie” job without offering anything!’

And with that, she apologises that she has to make her way back to the grindstone – literally. More rods to hammer, more welds to make… Her workshop itself is a new space, an incredible custom wooden structure made by husband John using traditional techniques, with help from local friends from the community, a community that’s growing and thriving, thanks to the skill of its members.

An artist who uses blacksmithing and fabrication to create their art – how does she sum it up? ‘I simply believe art is to search for your own answer. I want to create my work beyond gender, nationality and so on. Art should be more nerdy and crazily pure than all of those. To find something dazzlingly interesting in a pile of random something – this is the job for us artists.’

Me and Her and Junko

Back in 2012, your author was single and looking for love. A fun evening doing some business admin while cruising Guardian Soulmates, my inbox pinged with a ‘like’. Halfway through my VAT return, and most of the way through a bottle of red, a click revealed that someone seemed to like my carefully curated profile. Hers was, to me, less good. A stark portrait with a serious face, and some pictures seemingly taken on a potato phone. Undeterred, and full of Chianti-fuelled bravado, introductory chats on email got me a full name, which then led to slightly tipsy cyber-stalking, which found me a really cute photo of my new correspondent with an incredible metal sculpture.

The sculpture was Super Jumbo Nigella Wave, made by Junko Mori, and (with the assistance of Art Fund) purchased by my soon-to-be-partner for Rochdale’s Touchstones Gallery. Twelve years on, she still winces when we’re asked how we met – my recollection of the photo on her profile seemingly getting worse with every telling.

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