Meet Rosie Brand

Today we’d like to introduce you to Rosie Brand.

Thanks for sharing your story with us Rosie. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
I’m an artist working with sculpture, drawing, painting, writing… it starts to feel like a long list so I just prefer to say ‘interdisciplinary’ and see where each project takes me. I started off in illustration after completing my BA at Brighton University, UK. But after I graduated, I was working a variety of day jobs at pottery studios that lead me to exploring ceramics. I took a few night classes and became enamored with the medium. It’s formless in a really exciting way, I feel I can work intuitively and come to ideas in a bodily way. It’s a medium anciently entangled with humans and the way we tell our stories, furnish our lives and nourish ourselves – this history stuck a chord with me. It seems an interest in clay has the inherent ability to lead me to communities that are learning how to collaborate with each other, their materials and the world around them.

Has it been a smooth road?
Moving from the UK to the US five years ago was a lot of work. It was hard to build myself up from scratch in LA without knowing anyone. I moved here with my partner so I wasn’t totally alone but I definitely underestimated how difficult that would be. I felt very isolated as a freelancer, and it took a lot of putting myself in people’s way to feel otherwise. I think that’s what lead me to feeling such a strong need for community spaces.

Please tell us more about your art.
I’m interested in making tactile visual art about how we connect to the world. I want to create sensory experiences that foster alternative community space. This idea is still developing for me. The pandemic has changed so much; our behavior in public spaces and our modes of meeting. If anything, its the most interesting time to be thinking about these things.

One of the ways I approached this was a temporary mural drawn on newsprint that I laid out in a public park. I was able to share it amongst some friends and sit 6 ft distance apart, with this brightly colored fragile piece between us. It felt intimate and yet precarious. Most recently, I have been working on a project installing abstract plant-like ceramic sculptures in various ‘green spaces’ within the city. I took photographs- cropped close to sculptures nested within these living environments. The images have a sense of an imagined post-anthropocene future, a sculptural fiction of a more collaborative world. I’ve put together the photographs and notes into a booklet that I intend to send out soon via a mail-out. It’s a move towards a way of sharing that feels more personally engaged with an online audience, inviting conversation and collaboration.

Let’s touch on your thoughts about our city – what do you like the most and least?
The accessibility to the Angeles National Forest has been an amazing aspect of living here. I can drive 30 mins out of the city and find myself up a scrubby mountain amongst pines and sage brush. But also those haphazard green spaces within the city. In my neighborhood, there are a couple of these wild and weedy crevices caught between the freeways, and some community gardens intentionally carved out to create space for humans to be in relationship to plants. I enjoy lurking around the vegetable allotments and learning from the local gardeners there. These places are totally unassuming, uncelebrated and ultimately underfunded. Los Angeles is chaotic in this way- sadly private property developers seem to dominate how the city is formed and what ventures are prioritized, but some of these hopeful socialist efforts slip through the cracks and flourish.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.rosiebrand.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rosiebrand/

Image Credit:
Rosie Brand

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