ABOUT

Cassie Brown is an artist and designer living and working out of her 1897 chalet-style home in Western Massachusetts. Previously she lived in NYC and SF creating decorative objects and textiles for clients like Jonathan Adler, DwellStudio, and Zak+Fox. Cassie employs a variety of materials with a focus on clay and fiber. She has sold her functional work under the project name C’EST BON . CLAY & CLOTH at West Coast Craft, American Craft Show, Contemporary Jewish Museum, Gravel and Gold, and Interface Gallery. Last summer she was in residence at Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts in Maine.

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about an intuitive or childlike experience of the physical: grasping the laws of light and shadow via the object, capturing time through movement and stasis, and imagining new spaces, distorted in perspective and scale. Sculpture in clay is a way for me to feel connected to and understand the world. There is the feel of it, its response to my thumb, an actor that is the earth itself. Then there is the substance and matter-of-factness of it. It’s a thing, not an image of a thing. In school, I nearly failed physics. Words and images could not teach me the ideas. I needed it miniaturized and modeled, I needed to be able to turn it over in my hand. The physical world constantly surprises me. It feels full of tricks and magic. I take a lot of pictures. A good picture and a good work of art are both coincidences, brief and lucky, gifts if you are paying attention. I’m not sure I want to know more about the science or hard details of the world. I would rather discover them myself. I want to always play in my work. Formally, I’m often drawing from games I grew up with. Like the one where you try to get the ball through the maze without falling down a hole. It wants to fall. Newton’s apple. The world is as new to me and every other person on earth as it was to Newton in his time. I often think of the vessels I make more as shrunken landscapes, dollhouses, and dioramas for another world or species. Spheres act as characters, the most reduced forms existing on the planes of the work. I am asking myself, where do these characters want to exist? Are they resting, or stuck, or is this a still from a movie - if I turn the pot upside down, how does it change their experience?

FOLLOW ME ON INSTAGRAM FOR WORK IN PROGRESS