Fragile Tactility: An interview with Mia Rae June

This is a new series — and a first: an interview with the artist currently exhibiting at Grands Carmes. The first artist spotlighted is Mia Rae June, a Brussels-based contemporary artist and photographer.

She is currently studying at École de Photographie et de Techniques Visuelles Agnès Varda in Brussels. Her works explore the viewer’s relationship to intimacy and contact through visual and material fragmentation. 

June’s exhibition Divague was on view at Grands Carmes throughout December.

Some of your works incorporate materials beyond the scope of traditional photography. Do you see yourself primarily as a photographer?

I’ve always liked the term multidisciplinary artist. Photography is something I only started about 18 months ago. It’s a medium I’m really enjoying right now. Music, performance, and film have also shaped my practice. So while I do see myself as a photographer, I don’t want to limit myself. I want to stay free to experiment.

What camera are you using?

I’m using a 35mm Nikon F-501 from 1986 that I found for 30€ at a flea market in Madrid and haven't looked back since. 

What is your relationship to your/the camera? 

It became my baby, my partner, basically an extension of myself. Because it isn’t an expensive or fragile camera, I don’t feel precious about it, and that freedom changed how I shoot. I can throw it in my bag, take it anywhere, let it bump around, and it still works. That toughness lets me stay present instead of worrying about gear, and the camera becomes part of the flow rather than something I have to be protective of.

I definitely go through phases where I won’t leave the house without my camera out of fear  of missing a moment that suddenly appears. Carrying it all the time is also a great way to learn your camera and practice composition, I recommend it for anyone starting out. But lately I’ve been trying to move away from that and only shoot with a clearer intention in mind.

Your work on display really shows an exploration of material relationships. Can you talk about how you’ve come to start printing on mirrors?

Mirrors came into the work because I was thinking about fragility, fragmentation, and the tactile, reflective nature of my images. A mirror both reflects and distorts depending on where you stand. When I print on a mirror, the photograph has to compete with the reflection of the viewer, the room, the light. I like that tension between presence and disappearance, between visibility and being swallowed by your environment. It also brings the viewer’s body directly into the piece, so the intimacy becomes shared rather than one-sided.

Can you tell us about some of the imagery? 

The imagery in divague moves between very bodily close-ups and more fluid, atmospheric scenes. There are fragments of skin, latex, textures, things that feel intimate and almost tactile. And then there are images of the sea, which act almost like a counter-body, something expansive, unstable, constantly shifting. I’m interested in how these elements echo each other: the softness or tension of skin, the shine of latex, the movement of water. I’m not interested in showing a whole body or a complete identity. I'd rather focus on the parts that hold memory, vulnerability, or a kind of quiet tension. None of the images are meant to be literal. They drift between abstraction and sensation, like you’re moving through a series of physical impressions rather than a narrative.

There seems to be an attentiveness to sequencing in work which assumes various forms. I am thinking not just of the horizontal work including multiple hands, but the entire presentation seems to point towards seriality.

I think in sequences. It’s difficult for me to make single, heroic images. I’m drawn to how meaning builds through accumulation, through echoes, interruptions, and small shifts. Seriality lets me show a feeling or a moment not as a fixed thing but as something fluid, unstable, and relational. Even when a piece is fragmented, I want it to feel like one breath stretched across multiple frames. I don’t see my work as a collection of beautiful pictures I’ve taken, but as images responding to each other, engaging with the same subjects and ideas.

Your work feels both figurative and abstract: Clearly, there are human bodies in front of the camera, but none are identifiable, or perhaps only by their tattoos. 

Can you talk a bit about how bodily proximity relates to abstraction in your work?

When you get close to a body, it becomes unfamiliar. A tattoo becomes a landscape, a scar becomes a line, skin becomes texture. That proximity dissolves the certainty of what’s being looked at. For me, it’s revealing of something deeper than identity, something emotional, tactile, more about the relationship between me and the model rather than who she is. You might say it’s queer in its refusal to be fully knowable and defined.

How about performance?

Performance in divague isn’t about staging, it's more embedded in how bodies exist and move. Queer life in itself has a performative dimension: how we shape ourselves, how we survive, how we inhabit our bodies. In the work, I’m interested in moments of intimacy or tension where that performativity is subtle but present. To me it's more about presence, a sort of private performance that doesn’t need an audience but is full of meaning.

The title of your exhibition is divague. Tell us about the title.

Divague is a French word that means drifting, rambling, wandering without a straight line. It captures the emotional and visual logic of the work. My images aren’t trying to tell a linear story. They wander through bodies, materials, reflections, memories. The title also speaks to dissociation, to losing and finding oneself again, to the instability of identity and the beauty in that instability. It’s a word that feels both intimate and slightly haunted, which is how the work lives for me.

Interview: Expo Working Group - Images exhibition: Katrien Schuermans