StudioNotes by Rosie Brand

This website serves as a digital sketchbook, made by Rosie Brand.

A place for unformed ideas, notes, drawings.
A place where I can connect the things that have been informing my studio practice.

scroll right and down to explore

A tactful drawing then, is born of contact with the lived and felt world.

'Tact... is born of contact with the lived and felt world'
- Robert Macfarlane

How do I knit myself --
How do we knit ourselves back into our living surroundings?

slow absorption

of the world around me

informs the work

I pair my own evasive memories, half remembered scenes, objects, thoughts
-- with forms noted in my present world--
-- in the living environment --

A curbside plant, the loops and arcs of wild grass strands in an untended park.

This will forge a bond.
We become linked by poetry.

'Thinking/Making for more livable politics and ecologies, in the times of burning and extraction called the anthropocene/capitlocene.
In face to face and hand to hand entanglement-
crochet and woven together in cosmological performances to animate the tentacular cthulucene of a thousand names.'

-Donna Harraway

When I work with fluid mediums
clay ink dye paint
I abstract, I use the material to inform the work, more than any preconceived idea or figuration. I'm trying to learn from something outside of myself.
bring myself into my body, into matter. In this way, my thoughts can become physical.

'All of the stories are too big and too small, we need stories and theories that are just big enough to gather up the complexities, and keep the edges open and greedy for new and old connections'

-Donna Harraway paraphrases Jim Clifford

'Knowledge is felt, our bodies think and know in a way that precedes ideas of cognition.'

-Maurice Merleau-Ponty

'The hands have an infinity of pleasure in them. The feel of things, textures, surfaces, rough things like cones and bark, smooth things like stalks and feathers and pebbles rounded by water, the teasing of gossamers... the scratchiness of lichen, the warmth of the sun, the sting of hail, the blunt blow of tumbling water, the flow of the wind - nothing that I can touch or that touches me. But has its own identity for the hand as much as for the eye.'

- Nan Shepheard, The Living Mountain

We are losing touch with the world, with a whole part of all our knowing.

'When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it attached to the whole world.'

-John Muir

We need to return to our knot-knowing.
Another kind of knowledge,
A dance of hands and bodies.

A long seed pod,
dried to a spiral,
is caught in my bike spoke.
Chk Chk Chk.

I am trying to find new ways of exploring observed forms through drawing, making.

When i draw from observation, I isolate a shape- abstact it or repeat the shape into pattern.

I want to see the form from a different perspective, to split it open and apart, become tangled up in it.

Blind drawing of found seed pod

Through speaking aloud, or communicating with another- person or material.

We say more than we know.
In isolation, I am stationary.

Many of these images are photographs I have taken of works in progress in the studio, or on my walks out in the world. There are a few images of other artists work duly credited underneath in red. Writing in red is a quote from another writer or artist, all other writing is my own. Please do not lift anything from this webpage without my permission.

contact: rosiebrandstudio@gmail.com

What else can you offer the earth which has everything? What else can you give but something of yourself?

-Robin Wall Kimmerer