Using familiar objects and materials, and experimenting with scale, light, colour, and multiplicity, I want to form new environments that are stimulating, playful, and questioning art in the space it inhabits.
I enjoy the challenge of using landscape and architecture as a backdrop to site-determined pieces and often work with teams of volunteers to help me realise ambitious uses of scale and I find the shared ownership of the community as an important part of my artistic process.
Website : www.marybranson.co.uk
About the artworks
‘Echea 2023
Echea is a sounding vase, part of a suite of nine made for my solo exhibition ‘Unearthing’ at Gosport Museum and Gallery.
This is a multi -media show exploring the temporary nature of human existence through the archaeological traces left by ancient man. The vases are hand-built from terracotta clay and smoked fired with horsehair and Solent seaweed. In the Gosport show, the individual pots produce sounds that form representations of the different epochs of man’s development. They interplay and resonate with each other throughout the gallery space.
The Undertow, 2024
Smoked fired clay, steel, audio: 9’30”.
Looking to the horizon, standing on the edge of land and sea, the roar of the undertow signals to me that a seismic shift is taking place – and the world I know is passing. I sense my home is leaving me. This work is an installation of sound vessels that seek to combine the power of the sea and the fragility of our breath – to capture a place where they meet and to try to articulate the existential distress of Solastalgia. The hand-built anthropomorphic clay forms are porous, infused with the smoke of seaweed and sheep’s wool during firing. With special thanks to Mat Clark and Edd Jordan.
Low Tide – New Dawn 2022
Queen Elizabeth II lay in state in Westminster Hall for four days from 14 September 2022 until the state funeral on Monday 19 September. For the first time, New Dawn was stopped and placed in a holding pattern which reflects the Thames is at low tide, one solitary central disc.
Age of Man, 2023
Smoked fired clay, wood, paint.
This ceramic frieze reflects our recent entry and rapid advancement into the current Anthropocene epoch – the Age of Man. Smoke fired flint artefacts are dipped into cadmium yellow industrial paint, evoking our relationship to the sun in the face of climate change and man’s technological development. The increasing amounts of cadmium yellow in each concentric layer depicts the rise in atmospheric temperature. Geologists have described a key environmental marker, ‘The Golden Spike’, when plutonium isotopes left from the hydrogen bomb tests of the 1950s. This is when the Earth left behind the previous Holocene epoch – a relatively stable period that had lasted for 11,700 years, at the end of the last major Ice Age. With each circular ring, the yellow starts to drown the fossils, suggesting the ‘Great Acceleration’ caused by a range of activities: the burning of fossil fuels, deforestation, plastics and chemical fertilisers, the loss of biodiversity; and radioactive contamination from weapons testing. Reaching back through the lens of geoarchaeology, we can understand our human path through our cultural evolution and the traces of what we have created.
Unearthing, 2023
Unearthing is a multimedia installation which holds at its core thousands of locally discovered archaeological artefacts in a dramatic, sculptural display that tells the story of man’s journey through time to the present day – the Age of Man. Branson’s inspiration for the work came from research into archaeological finds in Hampshire Cultural Trust’s collections from both the Gosport area and across Hampshire. The artwork is a response to the ‘frozen’ period of the Covid lockdowns and emphasises the continuity of human history and the deep-rooted connections that we share with those who came before us.
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