You Will Be My Sun: Mia Weiner on Softness at Paris Photo Fair 2025

I had the pleasure of meeting with Mia Weiner at Paris Photo 2025, where she unveiled her latest body of work, You Will Be My Sun, a series that folds tenderness, memory, and agency into woven form. Known for merging photography with tapestry, she transforms digital images into soft, tactile surfaces that hold presence rather than merely depict it.

In this new series, warmth becomes a throughline: images once set aside resurface with new meaning, shaped by renewed connection and a desire to counter a year marked by heaviness with softness and care. At Paris Photo, these works glow quietly on the walls, intimate, grounded, and deeply felt, offering a contemporary reimagining of the photographic image through the slow, deliberate language of the loom.

Let’s start with the exhibition title, You Will Be My Sun. It feels devotional and relational: warmth, gravity, even dependence. What does that phrase mean to you, and how did it shape the emotional landscape of the show?

For me, the title comes from a feeling of warmth, which was an anchor while forming this body of work. At the start of the year, the extreme global tragedy and the political climate in the U.S. left me feeling a little paralyzed in the studio. In the midst of all that heaviness, You Will Be My Sun became a way of returning to self and grounding in warmth, connection, and light. It shaped the show as a space where warmth could exist again.

How did you navigate these feelings of heaviness?

In moments like this, we really need to refocus on humanity and our connection to each other. That became the emotional foundation of the show. I wanted the work to come from the power of softness, connection, and joy. The images I chose were joyful to weave, and that felt especially important for me in that moment.

Do you feel like it became your duty, in a way, to bring love or softness back into the atmosphere?

That’s a really nice way to put it. Everything we make has an energy, and, as I work, I try to be conscious of the energy I am putting into the world. More than a duty, it was remembering the fear was supposed to be leaving me frozen, and I could move back into a space of agency and refocus on my values. 

Much of your work engages with the body. How do you think about representation, and what perspectives are you hoping to challenge or shift?

A lot of my work deals with how the body has been represented in the Western canon, especially the objectification of women’s bodies. I’m shifting that gaze, making work about bodies in space, as bodies, not objects. Celebrating them.

Building on that, when you reimagine the female form in your woven images, how do you approach reclaiming or reshaping narratives of femininity?

Having agency over your own depiction is incredibly powerful. Even today, most the works we see in museums aren’t made by women. That’s slowly changing, but there’s still a long way to go. With each work, I try to make sure each body is powerful in its representation. 

Self-portraits can be confrontational as well as autobiographical. Was depicting yourself challenging, or was it liberating?

At first, using my own body was really just about convenience, I needed another body in the frame. But I quickly realized it was more than that; it carried meaning. Viewers don’t need to know it’s me to experience the work, but it does add another layer of depth. I didn’t tell anyone for years, heads were cropped or faces covered, so I could remain anonymous.

There’s such intimacy and memory in these works. Almost a residue of lived experience. What personal memories or relationships found their way into this series?

Some images are older, ones I loved but weren't ready to use. One included someone I had a brief romance with; my oldest friend modeled for Midnight sun, the blue work. The older photographs came from a relationship that did not end well, and I wasn’t ready to work on them until now. I keep an archive of all my images and sometimes they just need a little time to cook.

So you were holding onto them, waiting until the timing or your perspective felt right?

Exactly. I loved some of the photographs I took during the shoot, but they hand’t felt right to weave yet. Time passed. Recently, I entered a new relationship that is really beautiful, expansive, healing, and suddenly these old images held this warm, new feeling. They became like an alphabet I could finally use to describe what I was feeling in the now. 

Was that cathartic?

Not necessarily, I wasn’t working through hard feelings while weaving them, I had already done that work so I could use them. I was just excited to bring them to life. I couldn’t stop thinking about them in terms of form. Even with friends or partners, the shoots are formal, and are translating the shapes I carry in my mind into the world around me. 

Your weaving is so physical; threading, knotting, interlacing. In this body of work, how do those gestures mirror the emotional gestures you’re exploring?

I love that connection. I think a lot about what it means to move from the digital image and through care, time, material, and the hand, they becomes physical again - they take up space, they are an image, but they are also soft. When creating new images, instead of narrative, I think about the emotional reaction of each piece. What do I feel in my body when I see the image?

There's a beautiful tension in your work between softness and strength. How do you navigate that balance when composing each tapestry?

I think softness is strength. I think a lot about agency in the bodies, and color plays a big role. Darker yarns create more photographic contrast. Neons or pale tones abstract the image. The monochromes create new worlds and each weaving asks for something a little different. 

Speaking of mediums, your practice merges photography and textile. What draws you to combine them? What new language emerges?

Before weaving my practice was based in embroidery, piercing the surface to create image. With weaving, the image is the structure. The bodies are the body of the cloth. That changed everything. Photography entered the work more deeply then. I love moving from digital to haptic, what it means to take a digital image and make it soft, slow, physical. Letting it sit on a wall as cloth, not a print, not a functional textile, but an image with presence.

I often believe softness is undervalued. Do you see your work as a kind of quiet resistance? A radical softness in a world that privileges hardness?

Absolutely. The slowness of weaving feels radical. One of my grad professors talked about “slow and close looking,” and I think about that all the time. Whether it's a leaf in the park or a photograph that moves you, it's about taking a breath.

Let’s talk about the studio. Each tapestry is handwoven in your L.A. studio, a slow, meditative process. What does your studio rhythm look like during a project like You Will Be My Sun?

I’m an Aquarius. I don’t really do routine. I’m never really “off” as an artist, I’m always looking and noting the color or light or gesture of the spaces I’m in. But in the studio, I’m there most days unless I’m traveling. If I’m not shooting or editing my photographs and mapping them to be woven, I’m on the loom. When I weave, I like to weave in long bursts, often 16-hour days. I have been working on balancing the intensity of the labor on my body, but when I weave I usually like total immersion until a piece is finished.

That sounds incredibly labor intensive.

It is. That’s why I love residencies, people ask what I do without a loom, and I’m like, I roll in the grass. Laughs. I take photos, research, reset. Those breaks prepare me for a whole year of work.

And with this body of work here at Paris Photo, what do you hope people walk away with?

As artists we have intentions, and we hope they’re seen. But the magic is when viewers connect in their own way. You hope for a mix.

Thank you for this lovely, thoughtful conversation, it's been a joy.

Images courtesy of the artist and Homecoming Gallery.