Responding to Brâncuşi: Bodily Abstractions and Challenging Verticality

The question of Brancusi’s continuing influence resonates in my own contemporary sculpture practice.

In my early self-taught practice, the geometric flattening of forms and dynamic balance of materials of Brancusi were as vital to my development as the biomorphic smoothness of Moore and intercut organic shapes of Hepworth. I aspired to capture both essence and energy of human figures in motion, distilled into semi-abstract shapes of plaster or bronze.

My practice shifted through postgraduate education and political upheaval, as austerity politics and cuts in the arts in the UK made me similarly unravel the unity and smoothness of my own sculptural forms.
Working increasingly with found objects and direct-burnouts of organic matter, my developing interests in social change, ecology and gender resulted in a messier aesthetic. In my PhD I explored horizontal ways of thinking and making, re-considering relationships between the human and non-human, informed by feminist new materialism, queer, trans and critical race theory. In questioning the verticality of patriarchal structure, I also questioned early, male, historical influences such as Brancusi.

Yet the forms I repeat in my practice still trace a Brancusian approach, as I fragment and subvert gendered organs, abstracting the body into shape via plant matter. In my recent ceramics I slab-build columns of clay, daring upwards, reaching height by multiplication. It is just that now I also cut into the vertical, and populate it with vegetal totems, some like Brancusian birds as they reach skywards, others swimming sideways, split open and complicating the tower they inhabit: their essence and difference intertwined.

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2YSLzgB...