Linda Leslie Brown

By in Residency on January 10, 2015

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Linda Leslie Brown’s recent work incorporates a variety of practices, including sculpture, installation, painting and video/sound. Her work engages the interdependent relationships between nature, objects and human creative perception.

Brown’s recent sculptural works are rife with allusions to the body. At the same time they suggest the plastic, provisional, and uncertain world of a new and transgenic nature, where corporeal and mechanical entities recombine.

Brown has exhibited her work regionally and nationally. Recent exhibitions include the Danforth Museum of Art, Framingham MA, AMP Gallery, Provincetown MA, Bannister Gallery, Rhode Island College, Providence RI and Vessels Gallery, Boston MA. She is the recipient of grants and fellowship residencies from the St. Botolph Club Foundation, FPAC, Women’s Studio Center, Hambidge Center, and I-Park among others. She is represented by Kingston Gallery, Boston, MA.

She is Professor and the Foundation Studies Program Director at NESAD, Suffolk University in Boston MA.

View photos from Linda Leslie Brown’s Art Talk


Artist’s Statement

My recent sculptural work engages the interdependent relationships between nature, objects and creative perception. These pieces are intimate in scale, no larger than the size of your head, and they are emphatically hand made. My work is biased toward process: growth, change, and falling apart. I am immersed in the language of making, thoroughly engaged with tactile experience while creating work that merges the corporal and mental imaginations.

The materials in my work include domestic objects retrieved from thrift stores and discards harvested from our culture’s prodigious waste stream. They include metal, wood, ceramic, glass, stone, rubber and plastic. These chunks of stuff are packed together with malleable paper clay in a morphogenetic vocabulary of masses, planes and openings. The shapes are additive and layered, porous and eroded. I also include cast pigmented plaster elements, sometimes filling in the hollow spaces of ceramic limbs, contrasting empty and filled spaces. Bold and vulnerable, these works are half created and half destroyed.

My work is biased toward process: growth, change, and falling apart.

Holes penetrate the surfaces. Many pieces are bored completely through, revealing a hollow center like a vessel. The textural qualities of the paper clay retain the traces of making and suggest a haptic language of emotion. At times the surfaces take on an eroded quality, as if retrieved after a long immersion in the earth or the ocean, and so they seem to suggest history and impermanence.

These works display a deceptive insouciance, undercut by their strange hybridity. They are rife with allusions to the body. Thus they are likely to evoke the ways we feel about our own bodies: there are waves of disgust/disavowal, desire, delight and fear. I am very interested in the way people relate to these sculptures as creatures having agency. At the same time they suggest the plastic, provisional, and uncertain world of a new nature, where corporeal and mechanical entities might recombine.

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