Artist Statement

Clay is the heart of my artistic practice. I dig for this heart, hunting for red clay just as our first human ancestors hunted the landscape for exposed veins of iron-rich red ochre. At the dawn of human consciousness, this geo-biological bond of shared red veins established our empathetic blood-ties with the earth.

My hunting ground is the ubiquitous highway. I work with its forms and infrastructure, the land it divides and the refuse it collects. This non-place trains us in disconnection and control, feeding the ever-increasing force of human will, pumping a constant roar of goods and people forward along blackened veins. We have become untethered from the earth, traveling without walking, rushing past too quickly to smell, too loudly to hear, and too elevated to feel through the thick asphalt. I fight this frenzied isolation with obsessive gathering, binding, and building, enacting ancient human impulses in a place designed not to be touched.

I create large-scale ceramic sculptures of manufactured clay, wild clay, and raw materials collected from the highway, reestablishing human touch with the earth where it is most forgotten. By building a relationship of observation, interaction and creation with our land as it exists alongside us, I fight to bridge the ever-widening gap between our collective mind and body.

Bio

Bronwyn Simons is a ceramic sculptor and educator from Mitchellville, MD. She obtained her BFA in Ceramics from Maryland Institute College of Art, worked as a Work Exchange Artist at The Clay Studio in Philadelphia, PA, and ran Starr Garden Ceramics, an accessible community ceramics program in Philadelphia, from 2017 to 2020. Bronwyn was awarded the Area of Distinction Scholarship by the Ernest G. Welch School of Art and Design in 2021, the Joseph Perrin Award in 2022, and she is currently pursuing her MFA in Ceramics at Georgia State University.