Seed: A Living Dream
Pritzlaff Conservation Center Gallery, Santa Barbara Botanic GardenExhibition on view December 7th 2024 - June 8th 2025
A cross-pollination between science and art, the exhibition celebrates the strange beauty of seeds, featuring micrographs from the Garden’s seed bank, paintings from local junior high students, and large scale ceramic sculptures by Rosie Brand.
More information at Santa Barbara Botanic Garden.
You can read Field Notes from the Studio, an essay about the making of this show on substack.
Studio Ceramics, 2023-2024
Selected small sculptures.
The Names
2021-2022
This body of work seeds out of grief. It is my processing of the year I cared for my Mum as she lived and died with brain cancer. Tumors affected her ability to express herself, my role as carer included acting as translator. I read her needs through non-verbal communication. This connection was beautiful, awful, heartbreaking. As our communication fell away, so did my capacity to describe that trauma.
I returned to the studio after her passing, in search of the language to tell our story. There, the sun cast a stream of light through my window as I worked. Clay came alive, growing plant-like, shape-shifting vessels. Their shadows stretched out, informing their own becoming. Abstract wreaths, unraveling baskets, wriggling spider-hands carried me through grief toward a place of healing. I caught those glyphic shadows in cyanotypes.
The work itself is an act of translation. I transcribe loss to transform it. I search for meaning in the gaps between mediums, in the chasm of lost words. To hold what was lost, I press shadows to the page and bind them in blue.
Blue Gum
2023 (WIP)
Manuports
2020These ceramic sculptures were assembled alongside foraged driftwood, wolf lichen, granite boulders and photographed in early morning light at Tokopah Falls, Sequoia National Park, September 2020.
