EXHIBITION: 

The contemporary highway is the culmination of our species’ productive ingenuity, a site of ultimate disconnection and control. The ever-increasing force of human will pumps a constant, anonymous roar of goods and people forward along blackened veins. We are untethered from the earth, traveling without walking, rushing past too quickly to smell, too loudly to hear, and too elevated to feel through the thick asphalt. The Highway Between fights the highway’s frenzied isolation and selfish force with obsessive gathering, binding, and building, using clay to enact ancient human impulses in a place designed not to be touched. These actions are captured in large-scale ceramic sculptures that combine manufactured and wild clay with raw materials collected from the highway and transformed through fire. The Highway Between reestablishes human touch with the earth where it is most forgotten, to fight the ever-widening gap between our collective mind and body.  

ARTIST STATEMENT 

Clay is the heart of my artistic practice. I dig for this heart on the side of the highway, hunting for red clay just as our first human ancestors hunted the landscape for exposed veins of iron-rich red ochre. At the dawn of human consciousness, this geo-biological bond of red iron established our empathetic blood-ties with the earth.  

I work with the highway, the land it divides and the refuse it collects, as the ultimate contemporary site. It is the anonymous and ubiquitous location of our current reality. In this space of frenzied isolation, I remove myself from the safety and control of the car to reconnect with my most primal urges, hunting and gathering along Interstate-20. Mundane objects dot this systematic no-man’s-land: bubble wrap, roadkill, packing foam and netting. They lie forgotten in the wake of the trucks and trailers that once bore them, the machines roaring forward heedlessly in a display of the ever-increasing force of human will. 

I unite these abandoned highway materials with forms I create in clay, combining what is found with what is imagined. I bind these together through obsessive wrapping, as well as by firing all materials in the kiln together to let them fail, transform or survive intact under intense heat according to their own material nature. I fire my works with live flame to harness fire’s ability to both harm and nurture. Using both wild and manufactured clay, I build abstract clay forms by combining spires, hollows and arches together intuitively. These shapes embody the actions of reaching, holding and releasing respectively, creating sculptures that broadly mimic these bodily gestures.  

The highway is designed not to be touched. I focus my practice on this site to reestablish human touch with the earth, and to fight the ever-widening gap between our collective mind and body.  

ARTIST BIO:

Bronwyn Simons is a ceramic sculptor and educator from Mitchellville, MD. She obtained her BFA in Ceramics from Maryland Institute College of Art, worked as a Work Exchange Artist at The Clay Studio in Philadelphia, PA, and ran Starr Garden Ceramics, an accessible community ceramics program in Philadelphia, from 2017 to 2020. Bronwyn was awarded the Area of Distinction Scholarship by the Ernest G. Welch School of Art and Design in 2021, the Joseph Perrin Award in 2022, and she is currently pursuing her MFA in Ceramics at Georgia State University.