Structure brings together the ceramic work of BAU artist Joel Brown and the encaustic work of guest artist Alaina Enslen. Brown's "ceramic arrays" reflect crazy quilts, traditional Japanese wood-firing, and his background as an architect. On a quilt, fabric swatches produce a complex texture, often embellished with embroidery. The individual components of his arrays mimic those fabric swatches; the surface cuts are the embroidery, catching the flame and ash from Brown's wood firings. For Enslen, cloth embedded in the wax carries memory within its folds, shaped by function and expectation. By fraying, pulling, and cutting fabric, she transforms it into something vital, raw, and expressive. Threads become a means of drawing, tracing the invisible lines we create, just as the cloth we wear can express identity even as it re-enforces social constraints.

About the artists: Joel Brown trained as an architect at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and worked on major civic projects for 40 years. Brown is inspired by skeleton watches, in which the appearance of the mechanism is as important as the engraving on the case. The surfaces of Brown’s pieces are achieved by wood-firing through the action of flame and ash. He trained in hand-building with coils under Peter Callas and Joyce Michaud and in wood-firing with Roger Baumann, Kristin Muller, and Dan Greenfeld. Their kilns, based on ancient Japanese models, are stoked by teams for several days around the clock, reaching 2,300 degrees Fahrenheit. Brown is a member of Peekskill Clay Studios, has taught coil-building at studios in New York and Connecticut, and has curated shows of ceramics and painting. Alaina Enslen’s practice merges encaustic, textiles, and natural materials to explore the poetics of memory, identity, and transformation. Enslen has exhibited both nationally and internationally; her work is included in both private and public collections. She is a recipient of grants from the Luso-American Development Foundation and International Encaustic Artists. Enslen is currently represented by Carrie Haddad Gallery in Hudson, New York.