The installation comprises seven years of work, seeded in grief. The artist’s processing of the death of her mother and the year she spent caring for her. TSALA becomes a nest for Brand’s creaturely ceramic forms, porous vessels that play with sunlight. These abstract sculptures write in a language of their own, as tendrils of shadow are released by their hollows, and are transcribed by large scale cyanotype prints on textile and paper.
In 2019, a metastasized brain tumor gradually took away the artist’s mother’s ability to speak, write and move independently. Brand’s role as carer included acting as a translator, becoming an extension of her mother’s body, an echo of her voice. As the family labored through the horror of degradation, they were bonded by sorrow and elation at every small triumph. Together they walked towards death.
In the years since, Brand has searched for a language to tell this story. She took refuge in her studio in the Los Angeles foothills, speaking into clay. Inspired by her studies in local ecology, plant morphology and the spines of seed pods, she pushed traditional pinch-and-coil handbuilding techniques beyond their structural integrity, often bringing her forms to their breaking point. The sculptures that made it through firing are impossible, abstract wreaths, unravelling baskets, wriggling spider hands that carried Brand through her grief to a place of healing.
The Name in My Empty Hand is a story of relationships, between mother and daughter, between human and more-than, between life and death. By listening to the intelligence of clay, a living material, the artist asks how to loosen her grip, to hold and be held by that which she could not name.