Linda Leslie Brown

Artist Statement

I have been thinking about connection, response and mutation: the ways that we and all our fellow beings are entangled, as Mr. Darwin noted so vividly in his "Origin of Species." Darwin's notion was that sexual reproduction, by providing access to greater genetic variation, ensures a broader set of genetic capabilities for survival. Natural biological communities or biota have regulated life on this planet for billions of years.

Today's human-modified Earth environments have produced massive extinctions, as well as a rapidly developing new set of possibilities for connecting, responding, and adapting: including a proliferation of genetically modified organisms and technologically mutated life forms.

My recent sculptural work suggests the plastic, provisional, and uncertain world of a new and transgenic nature, where corporeal and manufactured entities recombine. These works serve as relics of possible futures and of the effect of human actions on earth systems. Today, one million species are at risk of extinction. How will life forms adapt and survive in a hot ocean of poisoned plastic?

Sometimes you start by taking things apart. In my work, I combine disparate discarded plastic parts and other found materials with handmade ceramic forms to create these somewhat creaturely, hybrid forms-implying today's technologically altered genetic schema and the struggle for species survival in the Anthropocene era. I imagine that such adaptations may be occurring even now: in the depths of mother ocean, among our gut bacteria, or nested in mycelium tendrils wrapped around the roots of trees.

Artist Bio

"Brown creates abstract remnants of a society hell-bent on technological progress, heedless of the warnings that are all around us. Despite the beauty of their forms and the way that they seem to beg to be touched, retracing the movements of Brown's hand as she worked with the materials, there is something rather banal and sad in the waste. Immune to the processes of decomposition and cycles of transformation that govern our bodies and other organic matter, these objects remain stubbornly inert as if found in some future landfill: broken, cast aside, and then petrified. The objects begin to write our era into the geology of the earth." –Heather Davis

Linda Leslie Brown's recent sculptural work draws upon the transformative exchanges between nature, objects and viewers' creative perceptions. Her practice involves assemblage of objects and fragments of plastic, metal, wood, fiber, glass, rubber, and foam which have been scavenged from the streets of Boston and other castoff sources like dumps and thrift shops. She combines these things with ceramic forms she has made and fired at various temperatures, paperclay, and cast pigmented plaster.

Brown has exhibited her work regionally and nationally. Recent exhibitions include Kingston Gallery, Boston, MA, Popop Studios Gallery, Nassau Bahamas, Danforth Museum of Art, Framingham MA, AMP Gallery, Provincetown MA, Wheelock College, Bannister Gallery at Rhode Island College, and Salve Regina University.

She is the recipient of grants from The Artists' Resource Trust / Berkshire Taconic Foundation, School of the Museum of Fine Arts Travelling Fellowship, St. Botolph Club Foundation, and FPAC, among others. Fellowship Residencies include Monson Arts, Haystack Mountain School, Ballinglen Arts Foundation, Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, Popop Studios International Artists' Residency, Women's Studio Center, Hambidge Center for the Arts, and I-Park, among others. She is represented by Kingston Gallery, Boston, MA and AMP Gallery, Provincetown.

Brown is a Professor in the Foundation Studies and Fine Arts Programs in Art & Design at Suffolk University, Boston.

Work available on Artsy