Joan Clare Brown
(She/Her)
Statement:
My work interprets womanhood, fertility, and how women experience constraining societal and cultural pressures, both emotional and physical, relative to physiological changes.
Since childhood, it has been ingrained in me to be passive - to avoid confrontation and to apologize. I have allowed my voice to be suppressed, to be bound and constricted, to feel invisible and without sound. Through this body of work, I have begun to reclaim my voice by speaking about my own struggle as a female.
Porcelain is a material that helps me represent purity, delicacy, and fragility. My use of it could also be considered an expression of strength, as it is one of the strongest materials known. This clay body allows me to mimic soft and supple flesh where highly detailed manipulations of surface, force the material to become something it is not. By stretching the limits of porcelain’s physical properties, my work symbolizes many of the complexities of femininity as defined by both myself and by society.
Jane and Gary, 2020

NFS
Alt Text: A ceramic sculpture is presented on a white background. The sculpture is cylindrical in form. It’s structure is composed of a latticework of slip, each bead resting atop one another, with negative space filling the voids in between. The slip is yellow in pigmentation, and holds three circular disks - two are black, one is red. The sculpture stands at 2.5” inches tall.

About Joan Clare Brown
Joan Brown is a ceramic artist currently residing in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She received her BFA concentrating in ceramics from the University of the Arts in 2013, and her MFA concentrating in ceramics from Bowling Green University in 2018. She completed a two-year residency at University of the Arts in 2020. Joan has shown work in Japan, New Orleans, Washington, Ohio and Pennsylvania, with a solo show 2019 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Joan continues to develop visual representations about the injustices women face incontemporary cultures.