Gratia Brown
Artist Website Link

Fragment Vignette IV

ceramic fragments and materials, mixed media with slipcast red and white clay, glaze, commercial decals

9.5" x 5" x 4.5"
2016

$250

The oldest known ceramic fragment is roughly 20,000 years old. It is a small thing, roughly triangular, a yellow brown dust color - unassuming. This fragment holds many marks: on one side along the rim there are decorative marks - dots in a line perhaps made by impressing a stick into the wet clay- and the unmistakeable surface blackening from fire, the other side shows us fingerprints and pinching texture from our ancestor coaxing shape and function from a mound of clay.

Fragments are cropped from their resolved place and form and we are left wondering about the original - its form, function, or sentiment and then also the series of events that led to the creation of the fragment. Fragments are mobile, small, dirty but often with a poetic allure, irregular, unstable, and precarious in their lack of resolution. By changing their visual context I hope that the viewer finds new poetry in a mundane material.