Joiwind Lowe
Private Atlas
Following her series Portals, which explored the pleasure and poetics of journeying, Private Atlas turns inward—examining the moments we carry home with us. The work considers how wandering becomes embedded within us, shaped equally by joy, longing, displacement, and memory. While both series embrace the sensuality and freedom of movement, they also acknowledge the deeper realities of migration and the enduring search for belonging.
Having lived between Miami Beach, San Francisco, Melbourne, and now France, Joiwind reflects on the emotional disorientation that can accompany even privileged movement across borders. These personal transitions have led her to contemplate the experiences of the nearly one hundred million displaced people worldwide. Though vastly different circumstances separate voluntary wandering from forced migration, the artist wonders whether both experiences might share a common language of hope, reinvention, and the longing for home.
As the great-granddaughter of a family who fled persecution in Russia in search of refuge in New York, Joiwind considers how movement—both toward and away from place—shapes generations. Private Atlas asks whether there is a poetry capable of holding these larger questions of belonging, memory, and identity.
Each photograph becomes a meditation on place and presence: a still frame gathered from a life in motion. The artist travels collecting visual fragments “like flowers to be pressed into a private atlas,” preserving fleeting encounters that later inform her understanding of stillness and movement alike. The image becomes both document and emotional residue; the journey itself remains the work.
Working primarily with 35mm film, Polaroid photography, and an old Leica camera, Joiwind embraces chance, imperfection, and improvisation as essential collaborators in her practice. The unpredictability of analogue processes allows each image to emerge with its own sense of discovery and intimacy.
A multidisciplinary artist working across photography, textiles, cast glass, and poetry, Joiwind holds a BA in Spatial Arts, an MA in Art in Public Space, and a doctorate in Chinese Medicine. Across mediums, her work explores the relationship between interior and exterior space, movement and stillness, and the emotional landscapes we inhabit.
