CLUSTER FEATURE:
ALISON BROWN
How does a jewellery piece become a work of art? It’s not an easy feat to accomplish, but Alison Brown’s jewellery inventions gracefully oscillate between art object and fashion jewellery in a way that not many can achieve. Her works evoke a playfulness that dances between substance and surface, highlighting the characteristics of its material composition whilst telling a story with its representational forms. Her Ghost Fishing necklace, for example, uses found sea twine braided and knotted intricately for durability and to highlight its wild textures. Set against a sleek handcrafted ceramic fish, the nautical symbolism gives way to another, more urgent theme: marine conservation.
This is a theme that Alison’s been focussing her most recent collection on, and it’s easy to detect her thoughtfulness surrounding issues of sustainability when looking at her finished pieces or having a chat with her. In fact, Alison lives her entire life this way. Near wooded greens and briny seas, she and her partner occupy an old chapel in Devon, complete with dilapidated outbuildings and a far-reaching garden on which to grow fruits and vegetables. Having moved in merely two years ago, there is a lot of work still to be done, but it’s a move to become more self-sufficient and mindful of resources, a philosophy that permeates through Alison’s many creations.
Alison’s jewellery pieces evoke both the familiar and the unexpected, using found objects such as discarded sea plastics and twine that would otherwise harm fish and birds or rusty nails found in her garden, buried as if it were compost. Through meticulous care and finishing, she arranges the objects with her own creations, ceramic, metal or otherwise, to create unique wearable art or art to adorn the household that tells a tale of anthropocentric disruption, and a desire to reclaim the harm we’ve beset onto nature in an attempt for rebalance.
The desire to repurpose and reclaim is rooted in the very inception of Alison’s creative drive. “Ithink my making started with Blue Peter,” she says, smiling. She describes coming home after school as a child and sitting in front of the television to watch the long-standing children’s television programme that provided segments on creative activities. This childhood scene that will be familiar to most Britons was the first exposure Alison had to crafting, offering imaginative ways to make art using household objects. Years later, with two degrees in ceramics and a wealth of experience to draw upon, Alison’s methodology remains true to its origins.
Repurposing found objects and taking inspiration from her immediate surroundings, Alison creates wearable sculptures that boast distinctive textures and mesmerising shapes, weaving soulful narratives about existence within nature onto their surfaces. Of her methodology, she tells me that she begins her investigations by drawing in her notebooks, and then transmutes these two-dimensional ideas into a three-dimensional object. She marries the delicacy of ceramics with the fluidity of textiles to create unique pieces that speak to the urgency of our current moment. Each piece is unique, weaving together complex histories whilst tackling the greatest challenges of the present, but not without careful consideration of the craft.
During her MA in Ceramics at Bath Spa University, Alison spent two semesters working with textiles, which has informed her ceramic projects ever since. Of this influence from textile arts, she says, “the ceramics technician during my MA at Bath once told me, ‘I can always tell when I’m firing one of your pieces because it’s always all about texture.’” This is evident throughout her jewellery pieces as well as her more recent wire basket creations, to the hero piece of her graduate show entitled “Feather Boa” which isn’t anything so camp and light as the name might suggest, but instead features a sheep skull found whilst on a walk in Devon, framed in carefully crafted ceramic feathers that evoked a sense of unbecoming weight. Playing with opposites here, the viewer might reflect on their own mortality, or the weight of our footprints that crushes the earth beneath, both physically and metaphorically.
As with many of us, the pandemic shifted her practice dramatically. Once fully immerse within sculptural objects, Alison has now expanded to exploring moving image and site-specific installations. Despite the changes to the mediums in which she works, her motifs of earth, air and water remain intact, with her focus on sustainability heightening as the current pandemic outlines the urgency of these issues. Her newest works on the theme of marine conservation reflect this, with each object reverberating with the reincarnation of what was discarded and left behind, posing danger to the creatures of the sea and the air, now given new depths of life, becoming art filled with stories as it adorns bodies and homes. “You can’t keep throwing stuff in the sea,” Alison says, lamenting the millions of tonnes of human debris that she has yet to save from its watery grave. “It’s not good practice for us as a species.”
Thank you for reading,
Cluster Team & Sandy Di Yu.
VISIT ALISONS’S PAGE HERE TO SEE MORE OF HER WORK