Ceramic artist b. brown has been working with clay for 30 years, her process guided by curiosity and a constant cycle of searching, questioning and learning. She sees clay as a medium that invites the exploration of pairings that may seem antithetical: discipline and rule-breaking, methodology and abandon, refinement and elaboration. Her studio practice is rich in creative articulations of these charged tensions, and she sees honing her technique as a kind of communion with the material that deepens her connection to it.
brown has never been one to conform to convention. Growing up between Los Angeles and New York City, her artistic history is varied, including forays into dance, film, design, and production ceramics, and she challenged expectations in each medium she pursued. All of these explorations have ultimately influenced her current work in ceramics, giving her work a depth of intuitive understanding of substance and motion. Her studio practice has always been rooted in form, or, as she describes it, “the architecture of vessels.” Now, she is focused on crafting large-scale sculptural vessels that challenge and interrogate conventional form and presentation. This exhibition builds on her 2024 show at Hecho a Mano, titled “A Handful of Earth, A Handful of Sky,” which featured a series of large clay vessels in earthen hues that carried recurring shapes and patterning, revealing a language all their own. In her upcoming show, brown continues to explore these symbologies and the dialogue between objects, “pulling elements of its language forward into new work, while also returning to certain shapes I had previously set aside.”
Her ceramic work is technically challenging: this show continues her exploration of the execution of double-walled pieces, which she refers to as “offering bowls,” and marks a return to her creation of footless round shapes that insist on leaning to one side in quiet defiance of traditional upright presentation. These forms often require innovative approaches to achieve: “There is technical difficulty embedded in every piece—all in service to the shape I am aiming to create,” brown says, often requiring her to construct them upside down, build blind, or be creative in how to fire them in the kiln. “This upcoming work reveals my desire to further distill the symbolic language, complicate the forms and have a conversation with limitation,” brown says.
These formal explorations are a part of brown’s larger thematic explorations of the concepts of constriction, contortion, and destabilization, or, as she puts it, “about the tension between a refined, deliberate presentation and intentionally built-in imbalances, and is there resolve in that tension.” With the creation of each piece, she challenges herself with a variety of questions:
Can I keep stretching the physical material with dramatic directional changes and maintain structural integrity? Is there beauty in precarity? In distortion? What happens if I put this pot on its end?
While brown’s ceramic sculptures are technically ambitious, she strives to make the rigor and intricacies involved in their construction recede into the background while amplifying the resulting elements of line, gesture, and overemphasis. “I can only hope the audience perceives—and perhaps shares—my love for the forms I remain obsessively drawn to,” brown says.
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