Brian Molanphy




I make containers to extend the hand, to fill the embrace, to light up the eyes, to shelter the body, & to enrapture the mind. It’s an exploration of place & placement informed by my own itinerancy. Instead of designing art for a particular place, I adapt my open-ended series of repeated elements to various places. Emphasis on artworks that can withstand frequent displacement (ontological as well as physical) reflects the strength of one of the principal areas of ceramics—pottery, which is moved around places to play different roles until it breaks. I rely on shadows for the composition of individual forms as well as for a connection between forms or series. Shadows are plastic & typically penultimate to light & form. However, their conventional secondary status may be seen as giving primary definition to form or identity through trace & memory. Poetry provides my recent & current projects with models of recollection of, representation of, & reliving of memory. This repetition is expressed in the modules that I make at the scale of a grasp, an embrace, or a shelter. Such modules are typical of pottery or architecture as a series of pots or bricks.