Wink King Moe is a ceramicist and fine art student cultivating a journeyed, soft style of making at Chelsea College of the Arts. King Moe’s big-bellied ceramics are each born from the kiln as a piece of her heart, with carved poems of love and painted dream-like florals.

A trained oil painter and contemporary dancer, King Moe turned to ceramics and the grounding energy of clay only last year. Vase-making promised a therapeutic tactility and a way to cradle her dreams and her difference in the bodies of these new works.

Each of King Moe’s pots takes a near-month or moon cycle to complete. Every movement, to trim, colour, carve, sgraffito, glaze, fire, pours another layer of integrity and love into the vase and imbues it with another part of King Moe’s fluid self. Working in calm moments feeds soft, textured handling; rapid thoughts give way to more forceful, colourful mark-making. The tightly-held, small necks of her vases both protect and let breathe King Moe’s open, melancholic fancies.

King Moe’s love of poetry is written on her pots themselves in her own bold carvings. King Moe repeatedly carves words from four respectively Japanese, Chinese, Korean and English poems in their original scripts. Each line laments the truth of life in dreams, the passing of time, the force of longing, the joy and fleetingness of love, and beauty in the ordinary. Sat alongside floral iconography and on the bulging bodies of King Moe’s ceramics, these poems become part of her new, brave, and beautiful world.