Joanna Pearl is a multi-disciplinary activist artist, making work about existential problems and in particular the climate crisis from air pollution to soil depletion.
Joanna Pearl works primarily in clay, and is currently using it to celebrate the amazing biodiversity hidden in the soil beneath our feet. She aims to overcome public preconceptions about ‘dirt’. Revealing this hidden world, she uses kinetic playfulness to breathe life into the material. With clay she creates stop-frame animations, using ceramic sculptures. Joanna Pearl likes to enchant the viewer with the exuberance of her forms.
“I often combine my exhibitions with clay public engagement workshops, as a way to open up conversations using ‘thinking hands’ principals. Clay has a way of slowing and deepening the conversation as participants co-make a response to a prompt question. “
Ceramic installations and animations
‘Unearthed – Mycelium’, a piece Joanna Pearl created in 2023, is a signature work to be shown in a landmark exhibition at Somerset House in 2025: SOIL: The world at our feet. For the same exhibition she is also creating a new ceramic installation of suspended soil microbes.
Joanna Pearl showed her animated short Unearthed in EarthPhoto 2024. The same work was also seen at the Royal Geographical Society, the 20/92 Video Festival in Philadelphia, and at EA Sustain in Colchester.
Left Unearthed, Mycelium; Right Unearthed 2
Gasping for Air
A previous body of Joanna Pearl’s work ‘Gasping for Air’, was commissioned for On Air, an exhibition she co-curated about air pollution in 2022.
As Joanna Pearl describes it: “Gasping for Air combines sculpting, clay stop-frame animation with ceramic kiln-firing, to investigate what it looks and feels like to struggle for breath in polluted air. Exploiting clay’s plasticity when wet, I capture my evolving forms photographically, bringing the clay to life with animation, then firing the final form to create a ‘still’ 3D sculpture. “
“Frozen in time, these fleeting ceramic moments take on a timeless quality. This installation was made especially for On Air, an exhibition about air pollution at Ceramic Art London 2022 at Central Saint Martins. Together with Iris de Kievith and Annemarie Piscaer, we have co-curated On Air and pulled together five international and British artists to make visible and tangible the invisible problem of polluted air. “
‘Gasping for Air’ was also exhibited at the epicentre of the clean air polemic at London’s City Hall. Here it was hosted by air pollution campaigner Rosamund Kissi Debrah. ‘Gasping for Air’ was also shown in Rainham Essex, one of Greater London’s air pollution hot-spots.
“The road to climate stability is long and uncertain and the chance to be part of a network of what I consider to be fellow ecologically-minded artists making campaigning work, is a way to remain resilient. I look forward to a chance to collaborate with and support this amazing group of people.”
