Artist Statement & Practice
"I work at the threshold where the body meets the material — where flesh becomes form, and form resists meaning."
Mia Zhou is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans ceramic sculpture, wax installation, and mixed-media inquiry. Her work draws from the aesthetics of the specimen, the laboratory, and the natural history cabinet — creating objects that are simultaneously intimate and unsettling, beautiful and deeply strange.
Trained at the University of Alberta with a Bachelor of Fine Arts, Mia's early practice was rooted in material exploration — the tactile resistance of clay, the thermal transformation of wax, the precision of mold-making. Her undergraduate years laid the technical foundation that continues to inform every piece.
From her first exhibition Exposure (Rutherford Galleria, 2015) through the more developed works of Change Climate (2018), Mia was already drawn to the tensions between preservation and decay, containment and overflow — themes that would become central to her mature voice.
Her graduate work crystallized around what she calls the "abject specimen" — objects that occupy a liminal space between the clinical and the organic. Part laboratory artifact, part natural history curiosity, her installations place familiar materials (wax, resin, fiber, ceramic) into relationships that feel simultaneously scientific and deeply personal.
The series As If Matter Matters (Rutherford Gallery, 2019), her thesis exhibition, represented a turning point — a fully realized body of work that interrogated the body's vulnerability, its fluids and membranes, its resistance to neat categorization.
During the isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic, Mia returned to the kiln. With the studio contracted to the interior and the world reduced to stillness, she began a sustained investigation into the dialogue between glaze and clay — two materials that carry memory of fire, time, and transformation.
Working at the intersection of ceramic tradition and painterly intuition, she developed a signature technique of fusion firing — layering glazes in multiple high-fire cycles to create surfaces that evoke mist, water, and the indistinct edges of memory. The Impressionist landscape became her central motif: not painted, but fused — emerging from the chemistry of heat and silica rather than applied by brush.
Her ceramic works have since been acquired by the American Museum of Ceramic Art (AMOCA) in Los Angeles, California — placing her practice among the significant voices in contemporary American ceramics.
Visit miasmudhouse.com →Hand-building, wheel-throwing, and slab construction. High-fire and mid-fire stoneware.
Casting, layering, and thermal manipulation. Both encaustic and sculptural wax techniques.
Plaster bandage, silicone, and alginate life-casting for precise reproduction.
Translucent casting for work that plays with light, transparency, and membrane-like surfaces.
Natural and synthetic fibers, found textiles, nylon, and chicken wire as structural elements.
Wood cut, lino cut, and silk screen — prints that extend her sculptural vocabulary into flat form.