clare burson

I am an interdisciplinary artist focused on the relationship between history, memory, and identity. As communities across the globe transform under the weight of climate change, pandemics, and armed conflict, I use ceramics, textiles, found objects, and sound to explore the ways in which we preserve memory, collectively and as individuals; What is remembered, why, by whom, through what means, and how does this process of preservation shape us and our descendants? I began my artistic career as a musician and singer-songwriter, writing and recording albums that explore intimate moments of loss and nostalgia. My sculptural work, haunted by the specters of fallen civilizations, considers the larger churn of history. I reimagine both our distant past and our decaying modern world by creating wheel thrown and hand built ceramic vessels with surfaces that appear aged, abandoned by their creators and emptied of their content. My practice also engages the compulsion to unearth, preserve and restore these vanished and vanishing worlds by destroying a portion of my work and binding the resulting shards together with found objects, keepsakes and recycled fabrics using brightly colored rope, cord and thread. These pieces, simultaneously soft and sharp, muted and bright, chaotic and controlled, become physical manifestations of memory-making, constantly asking us to reevaluate what is remembered, how, and by whom.
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