Mouth-Blown Glass
I must have been about six the first time we visited the glass manufacture in Biot. Entering the loud, dark warehouse, the glass blowers standing between blazing furnaces, blowing red hot glass through metal rods. Magicians at work. A drop of glass fell and a craftsman gave it to me as I stood spellbound.
There was something ceremonial about leaving the noisy, malleable, potential of the forge and entering the cool, ordered, quiet shop. The glass had now been assigned a form, satisfyingly displayed like gems. Once home, the unboxing was a ritual, each glass infused with hundreds of Biot’s signature bubbles. After that, whenever I encountered this seemingly “normal” everyday object, I would be mesmerised, the glass becoming a direct portal to the magician’s lair.
I took some of these glasses with me when I moved out, and this still happens to me when I open the kitchen cupboard.
Maia Beyrouti
Maia Beyrouti studied Conservation of 19th Century Photographic Materials and Visual Communication in London before moving back to the south of France in 2005. As a multi-disciplinary artist her body of work ranges from painting, writing and ceramics, often using the methodologies of rules-based art to express collective and personal experiences of absence and the elsewhere, and the urge to conjure what is lost or forgotten.
Her work is defined by her French-Palestinian roots, both cultures having pronounced and ongoing traditions in craftsmanship and storytelling.
Founded in 2016, Moio Studio is a place for research and collaboration, creating objects that inhabit the space between functionality and these emotional impulses.
She is now based in Berlin, Germany since 2009.
