Gemma Brown

Approaching my practice with a sense of curiosity and play, my work navigates relationships to place during a time of rapid environmental change. Incorporating found waste materials from industrial process, I use experimental ceramic processes to respond to places of anthropogenic intervention.

In my process, I visit and revisit building sites around my local area on Ngunnawal/Ngambri land. Stratified and unearthed evidence of human relationships with environment are revealed through the industrial processes that take place there. Rock, clay, and debris I collect from these sites are combined with industrial waste products and commercial materials. Drawing on my experience of places visited, I look to interaction between material and process, letting the unexpected results guide my making.

The forms that emerge reflect the competing and coalescing human and environmental energy present in the sites visited. For me, my work becomes a stilled repository of this point in time and place. From this point, I can reconcile with tensions in our ecologies and imagine ongoing relationships with environments and place in flux.