Joanna Mallin - Davies Welsh, b. 1965
The elegant symbolic gestures of Chinese and Japanese art find expression in Mallin-Davies' bronzes
Joanna Mallin-Davies is an academically trained bronze and terracotta sculptor, born in the coal lands, in the Rhondda Valleys, South Wales, in 1965. She travels a lot for work, in Europe, the United States and Asia, before arriving in Tuscany. Terracotta is her first love, but it is with female nudes and bronze horses, even monumental ones, that she finds a way of expression in balance between the material and spiritual sphere, East and West, Mediterranean classicism and oriental philosophies. The elegant symbolic gestures of Chinese and Japanese art find expression in Mallin-Davies' bronzes, in the sensual curves, which manneristically dilate with the power and delicacy - to use an oxymoron - of a calligraphic gesture, of a late pictorial smile Renaissance or a prehistoric engraving. A state of grace resonates in her sculptures - be they horses or male, female, heroic or ideal nudes - among the subjects dearest to the history of art, in the infinite formal, aesthetic and iconographic variations.
Mallin-Davies graduated from the College of Art in Cardiff and immediately began a career as a professional artist. In the early 1990s he moved to Hong Kong for work for some time, before returning to Great Britain, based in London, then Paris and subsequently to northern Denmark, on the edge of a fjord, where, in the glacial and raw beauty of nature, discovers an ideal space to create, imbued with peace and serenity. In 2008 she temporarily stayed in Florence to cast a work intended for the Sculpture Walk Sioux Falls event in South Dakota, receiving the award for best bronze. At that point, after a twenty-year career as a sculptor studded with successes and recognitions, Joanna decides to move to Tuscany, with the awareness of having rediscovered the origin and primary inspiration of her art, immersed in the land of the Renaissance masters . She exhibits in galleries, fairs and institutional spaces all over the world: Italy, Great Britain, Denmark, Hong Kong, Singapore, United States. Her sculptures can be found in private collections and museums, such as the National Museum of Wales in Aberystwyth, Morsø Folkebibliotek and Kirsten Kjærs Museum in Thy, Denmark.