Interview with Katie Bonadies, September 2024
Mia is a designer by trade as well as an artist who works in wood, ceramics, print, and fiber. Everything they do, craft or no, they approach through a designer’s lens. Each of the mediums Mia works in is inspired by something or someone in her life that sparked curiosity. Her father is a woodworker, her mother loves ceramics, and her aunt was a fashion designer before pursuing interior design. Once Mia makes a connection with a craft form she keeps building on it, combining them together to test their boundaries and see what can be created. Mia has been a member at Running With Scissors since December 2023.
Everything Mia makes is rooted in communication, the basis of design. Almost all of her mediums incorporate a form of typography, from print pressing old-school typefaces, or carving letters into wood, and pressing into clay, “I love that element of design, how markings becomes language with a bit of craft.” This approach is personal for Mia who grew up with a heavy speech impediment that made it nearly impossible for anyone to understand her–including her parents–with the exception of a childhood friend who would translate Mia’s sounds into words. Without ways for Mia to communicate and starting from a point of misunderstanding Mia was constantly in a position to fight against that barrier. She worked with a speech therapist who came to her home four times a week for years. As a result, and by the age of eight, Mia was a part of a New York Theater company performing with diction understood by all. She now considers effective communication a marker of success, “I think my childhood impediment subconsciously rules me in a way that I will never be able to explain to people.” Whether it is doing her job, representing herself, or setting boundaries, communication impacts every aspect of her life. Today Mia has no trouble speaking publicly and often returns to MECA&D, their alma mater, to share their artist at work story with students and parents.
Aesthetically, Mia has an inclination to use clean, heavy lines. She throws thicker; she creates thicker wood pieces; and she always naturally goes thicker in her illustrations, designs, and calligraphy work, “I like the density of how it translates in a space or environment.” Growing up in New York City Mia had access to some excellent art instructors and tutors, all of whom discouraged her inclination for bold lines, calling it “too graphic”, which is why she pursued design instead of other art forms. As an adult Mia is letting go of some of the rules she learned and is leaning into the heavy-handedness that comes to her naturally. Mia also loves to play with scale and makes miniatures out of clay and works larger in wood to add humor or create a context shift, which she explains is an inherent design concept that translates well to craft.
Mia’s process, no matter the material, takes on a very design-thinking approach that includes research, defining the challenge, ideating, prototyping, testing, and ultimately innovating and applying. They revisit that process until their goal is reached. They typically scrap projects at the 60-70% completion mark before restarting and moving in a different direction. Only about 20% of their ceramic work makes it into the kiln and they reclaim the scrapped clay forms for other projects. “The clay process is therapeutic, seeing something go from start to finish and having the power to just crunch it. There’s something so freeing about that. It’s a reminder to not be so precious.” Having open access to a studio means Mia gets to manipulate and play within their craft. This differs from her approach with design which is inherently rooted in process, deliverables, commercialism, marketing, and capitalism.
Recently Mia started working on turning their design pieces into clay, bridging their work through interdisciplinary methods. One example is a print she designed in art school that represents a periodic table of well-being. The design came out of 2020 when Mia was a rising college senior doing research for her thesis about wellness and how we retain things through trauma while the world was living through the early days of COVID-19. Mia came across an eight-year study out of Harvard Medical School that tracked the different components a person needs to create a balanced life. She immediately recognized that the number of elements in the study lined up with the number of elements on the periodic table (188, for reference) and the concept clicked.
The print is primarily black and white with flourishes of color and is available in multiple colorways. It frequently finds its place on nursery walls because infants are attracted to the high contrast in the early stages of their color vision development. The print also acts as a reminder for guardians to practice self-care and model its importance. The elements include things like movement, nourishment, and mentorship. Having a background in design allowed Mia to take the information that she wanted to communicate and translate it into a visual that’s easier to understand. For her current project she wants to take the content of the periodic table of well-being and turn it into clay tiles that are typographically carved into and hung on a wall in an exhibition-style display.
Mia loves that she knows how to make a dining room table, resole a shoe, save garments, and make a bowl. These skills are fundamental to living a sustainable life, skills that we as a people are losing. Mia wants everyone to understand that being creative is not a job, it’s a capacity. That our society has turned artist/ designer/ craftsmen into ‘creative’, “While that may allow a couple more people the opportunity to explore art, more often by design it deters hard working artists, knocking down their success and skills that took years to trial, adjust, and master.” Creativity is something we all have, it’s what we do with it and turn it into that gives us a sense of identity and makes an impact.
View and purchase Mia’s work through the online store on her website, delbenedesign.com. Contact Mia via email delbene.design@gmail.com and follow @m.dashingg on Instagram.
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