An Interview With Julie Moon

Julie Moon, Eggplants, 2025. Porcelaneous stoneware, glaze. 11 x 9.5 x 9.5″. Collection of the artist. Photography courtesy of the artist.

As I’ve followed Toronto-based ceramic artist Julie Moon’s work over the years, it’s always struck me how fluidly she can vacillate between crafting pieces that are exactingly graphic and pleasingly organic. Her sculptures wiggle, bloom and burst as if a life force dwells inside each one.

Perhaps that’s why many of Moon’s works take the shape of flowers and other plant life – the bounty of her ideas mirrored in the fertile nature of her subject matter. And recently, she has expanded this mindset of abundance to include voluptuous fruits like peaches, pomegranates and eggplants within her oeuvre.

Owning a few pieces of Moon’s work myself, including an elegant vase and much-complimented brooch, I know what an impression of delight her ceramic pieces make on the world. So, I was happy to see the theme and title of her last show at Patel Brown in 2024 (her first solo exhibition in Toronto since 2018) was “flourish” – a sentiment that, after recently speaking to Moon, seems apt in describing her continued course of creation.

For that show, Moon experimented with a paper-cutting technique to realize some of the works; she also took inspiration from the Tang Dynasty’s tradition of Sancai glazing (describing the use of the particular colour combination of brown, green and cream/off-white).

In a more recent group show at Hunt Gallery, Moon displayed a series that harkened to the spirit of exploration in different ways, most notably in composition. Moon used varied handbuilding techniques to craft both plump fruits and exacting architectural elements, placing them together in joyful juxtaposition.

Now, Moon’s solo show Fruits at The Canadian Clay & Glass Gallery in Waterloo highlights even further movement in this trajectory of trial. Here, she navigated the influence from a type of Korean still life art called munbangdo to concoct a collection of vessels, florals and fruits through which, says the show’s curator, Peter Flannery, “Moon engages the intersection between ceramics and the natural world.”

Given that Moon has even more work on view at the Art Gallery of Burlington’s anniversary exhibition Time Isn’t Real, I thought I’d catch up with her to hear more about where her practice is heading.

Installation view of I can’t count but I can point. Photography courtesy of Hunt Gallery.

The work in the Canadian Clay & Glass exhibition, and what was shown at Hunt Gallery, is a bit of a departure for you. How does it reflect where you are in your practice?

I have trouble committing to one kind of style or genre in my work. Also, working in this medium and going from smaller commercial items like jewellery to larger sculptures makes it hard to focus on one particular thing for me – but that's part of the reason why I like working in ceramics.

I'm always struggling to try and blend certain aesthetics together. With the Hunt Gallery show, I was able to do that, but the works aren’t just composed of one singular built piece. I used a method of taking two separate things and then putting them together to essentially create one sculpture.

I wanted to build really architectural shapes and forms and then use those forms to inform the surface of a work. For example, if I'm handbuilding with coils and pinching, then the work and the glaze takes on a look that's softer. I was also trying to do that with like the dripping glazes I used in the pieces from the Patel Brown show.

Daniel [Hunt] saw the pieces for the show months before it opened, and I explained that I didn’t feel like everything was quite yet resolved just as individual things on their own. That led to thinking about fruits, and from there a kind of dialogue was created between the two separate things, like the peach and the platform. And going from flowers in the Patel Brown show to fruits in the Hunt show just made sense, because to me they’re the same thing – the peak of plant growth.

Installation view of Fruits. Photography courtesy of The Canadian Clay & Glass Gallery.

And what about the current show at The Canadian Clay & Glass Gallery – where do these pieces fit in?

This show is a continuation of the ideas I was working with for the Hunt Gallery show, where I'm taking individual units of things and combining them with other pieces so as a complete sculpture, it's made of different parts. But, when I started building those pieces, I thought that maybe they would be built all in one – like, if the piece was of a cat sitting on a pillow, it wouldn't be a cat and then a pillow, it would be one form.

Is there a cat on a pillow in this exhibition?

No, but I did want to make some cats! I always run out of time.

So it sounds like things are still evolving with this concept.

I like the idea that something within a finished body of work can act as a thread that pulls you into a new direction. Maybe next, instead of two objects, the sculptures become a totem.

It’s just a matter of gathering all my tools, and then I can play. And even if that means that I have separate finished objects that I then combine together, it's an extension of that kind of play and experimentation. You never know how things are going to come together.

Installation view of Fruits. Photography courtesy of The Canadian Clay & Glass Gallery.

And there’s also a sense of unpredictability of ceramics in general, right, in terms of what the glaze does for example.

Or even with getting dressed! Like, I want to wear a certain sweater, but what am I gonna put with that sweater?

For me right now, the answer is always sweatpants.

[laughs] So maybe there'll be more random things that I put together in the future.

I liked that the Hunt show put you with two painters, Kate O’Connor and Anders Oinonen, because I consider painting so integral to your practice. I feel like a ceramic form is a canvas for you. Although now that I think of it, the vase we bought when we moved into our house that you made is all white!

I remember when I was in grad school, there was this one sculptor from France, and she would tell me that she didn’t understand why I wanted to paint my sculptures; that the forms are great on their own. And I just can’t do that. I think I have a little bit of that fear of empty spaces, or horror vacui.

Oh, I've never heard this term before! [Reader, I had and just forgot; it was during this very entertaining and educational episode of the podcast 99% Invisible about how the Victorian era launched plant person culture. How apropos!)

See Julie Moon’s work at The Canadian Clay & Glass Gallery and the Art Gallery of Burlington now until the Spring.