Celine Browning

Artist Statement

General Statement:
I am an interdisciplinary sculptor with a background in metalsmithing and fibers. My
work is informed by the history of surrealism, particularly Jung’s theory of the collective
unconscious. Creating art in a diverse range of media, I deconstruct and combine images and
objects in an unexpected way, creating work that seems frozen in transition, caught between
contradictory states of being. By destroying, investigating, and ultimately rebuilding common
symbols, I aim to question the relationship between signifier and signified, image and object,
sacred and profane.  

Submission specific statement:
My submitted work honors mothers, and their extraordinary capacity to change the world. Each sculpture in the series "Fettled" is made of discarded children's clothing. The seams have been meticulously picked apart, and each piece is unmade and remade anew, bound together by complex line drawings in thread. Each is pinned, like a rare butterfly, to a painted wood silhouette. The thread drawings are based on a series of tracings from my postpartum hair loss: every day for one month, I would gather the hair from their brush and place it on a light table, tracing over the resulting abstract composition. This ritual became a meditation on the invisibility of caregiving, and the toll that caregiving can take on the body.