Sandy Brown Presentation March 2, 2011 ASTT Headquarters 5.00 pm Report by Bunty O'Connor

Sandy Brown Presentation at ASTT

 

There were about 25 people present on the evening of March 2nd.  Many people enjoyed the talk so much that they have asked whether she might come back and give a workshop.  She so enjoyed Carnival that I think  she might.

Some of the interesting questions raised were:

Question:  How do you prepare yourself to work?

Sandy:  I start by knowing that the day after tomorrow I want to be in that state of mind - I might start by washing the floor in the studio.I might start to doodle with the clay, every doodle being the stepping stone to something else.

 

Question: I  hear you say that you respond to your intuition while working.   At what point in the process do you let go?  How do you  feel when that impulse comes over you?  I want to get a sense of your  feelings when the object you are making resounds in you".

Sandy:  I let go of the feeling to control what I am making, the fear of failure and the desire to please others.  I need to let go. It is the best feeling in the world - absolute ecstasy!  I then know I  cannot do anything wrong.  I don't want to control the time of  creativity but I do want to be in control of firing the finished piece  in the kiln.

 

Sandy Brown is a painter and clay artist who creates large abstract sculptures.  She is visiting Trinidad & Tobago for Carnival  2011 and gave a talk and Slide show presentation at the ASTT Headquarters.

Sansy started her artistic career in Mashiko, Japan where she worked as a potter and later returned to the UK.  She has exhibited and given talks all over the world, most recently traveling to China to brainstorm with other European ceramists on new directions. Her motto is "creativity is play".

Gabi Dewald from Keramik Magazine says:

"Today it is hard to imagine the European ceramics scene without her. She is famous for her spontaneous, passionate use of clay and colours.Her almost provokingly simple use of form and her strong, energetic brush decorations feed from direct emotion, from confidence in her own intuition and from a portion of childlike anarchy she preserved for herself".

Sandy Brown, the British ceramics artist, lives and works in Appledore, Devon.

Her life work begins in the early 70s, when she leaves everything behind for four years of study with a potter in Japan. She learns the craft and her capability by copying traditional techniques. This is clearly a crossroads in Brown's life; and she returns to Britain with a Japanese partner, and continues to confront the challenge of her identity as an artist, a woman, a creative being. With simple language and a couple hundred images, she describes the process of self-discovery. A style emerges that is large and expansive as her generous good humour, as her throaty laugh.

Clearly, in her 40 years as a potter, Sandy Brown has let go of many things - her mother's inhibitions, society's expectations, boundaries of place and time. Her paintings are deceptively childlike, daubs and scribbles in pure primary colours that also serve as doodles for utilitarian vessels (bowls, jars, cake plates!) and maquettes for larger than life ceramic sculptures. Sandy is not a small person, and it requires more than average strength to throw and turn figures that punctuate impressive landscapes. So her creativity extends to devising the way to shape, glaze, fire and mount a 12-foot  tower of ceramic beads or parts around a steel core.

The technique for loosing creativity is letting go, she says. You intuit that this is more than a process of going at your artform with ouija board blindness. Play allows you to free your deepest creative instincts. Openness taps the experience and ingenuity which you will require to take it to completion.

This is what she says: "When we are responsive to what is happening during play, when we have an open mind, and lose all attachment to having to produce a 'work of art', that is when it happens. By it I mean creativity. And when we are being mot creative we are most ourselves, so you will discover more abouut yourselves too. You just do it, instinctively, spontaneously, playfully."

Each in his or her own way, every creative artist understands this process. It's what allows us to do our truest work. The page - or computer screen - may be blank. The canvas clean. The clay an earthen lump. But  the mind - call it the collective unconscious - is teeming. This is what we tap into when we "play." We stream the void.

And so we have from T. S. Eliot:
"At the still point of the turning world;
Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards;
At the still point, there the dance is..."

And from Sandy Brown: "Dancers "conceptualised through playfulness; and completed with the artist's precision, experience and technology.

Should we not all be at play in the field of the universe!

See more of Sandy Brown at http://www.sandybrownarts.com/

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