b. 1981
Jackie Brown’s work stems from a love of materiality, a fascination with living systems, and an ongoing curiosity about what it means to be alive. Her process is driven by experimentation and discovery, and she loves allowing for the unexpected. Brown widely exhibits drawing, sculpture and installation work and is the recipient of multiple grants including a Maine Artist Fellowship and the Lighton Award. She has been an artist-in-residence at the Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts, Monson Arts, the European Ceramic Work Centre, the Archie Bray Foundation, Emmanuel College, The Pajama Factory, and the Museum of Arts and Design. Brown received her MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University and her BA from Hamilton College. She currently lives in Bath, Maine and is an Associate Professor at Bowdoin College.
“Each work in the series combines sticks, branches and vines with man-made ropes and knots. By making molds and replicating the objects in clay, I was able to translate the forms into a single material language and combine the malleable clay parts to blur boundaries between them. Using these familiar references as a touchstone, I aim to explore human nature and ways that we try to control natural processes, both fostering and restricting growth. Once fired, the ceramic parts often suggest bone or something that has fossilized and the abstracted forms conjure up notions of something that is at once alive and growing, dead and decaying, moving and malleable, frozen and rigid, ecological, geological, and anthropomorphic. I see the work as a response to the complex challenges of our time, especially regarding the environment and our fraught relationship with living systems.”
Q. If you could offer your younger self any advice at the start of your artistic career, what would it be?”
A. “Give yourself permission to make bad work. Lots of it. Take risks, experiment, and let it get weird. Follow your curiosities wherever they take you and see what you can discover through the act of making. Be willing to slow down along the way and let the work evolve gradually. Process takes time. Lots of time. It is also perfectly ok if you do not know exactly what the work is about or exactly where it is going. That process takes time too. Develop strategies that help you get out of your own way so you can keep the momentum going. Find joy in the process wherever you can and cultivate that. It will sustain you.”
www.jackiebrownart.com
www.instagram.com/j_a_c_k_i_e_b_r_o_w_n/