ABOUT

Clare Burson is 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, Burson uses 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?

Burson began her artistic career as a musician and singer-songwriter, writing and recording albums that explore intimate moments of loss and nostalgia.  Her sculptural work, haunted by the specters of fallen civilizations, considers the larger churn of history.  Wheel thrown and hand built ceramic forms with surfaces that appear aged, destroyed, and abandoned evoke and reimagine both our distant past and our decaying modern world.  Burson explores our compulsion to unearth, preserve and restore these vanished and vanishing worlds by regularly destroying a portion of her 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 deciding what is remembered, how, and by whom.