Jeremy Brooks approaches ceramics by fundamentally altering the physical behavior of clay. Based in Conway, South Carolina, the artist developed an elastic clay body that can be extruded into thin fibers and manipulated through knitting, crocheting, knotting, and weaving before being fired into rigid ceramic forms. The material behaves more like rubber during its brief working period, allowing Brooks to construct vessels through techniques normally associated with textiles rather than pottery.
The tension between softness and permanence is central to the visual character of Jeremy Brooks’ ceramics. His small-scale vessels retain the loops, stitches, twists, and irregularities of fiber-based construction, while firing transforms the flexible material into porcelain or stoneware. Brightly colored clay can heighten the resemblance to yarn, whereas wood-fired surfaces introduce a more subdued and tactile vocabulary. The result is a body of work in which conventional expectations of ceramic construction are displaced by processes more commonly associated with handicraft and textile production.
Brooks’ broader practice also uses ceramics to question assumptions about domestic objects, American visual culture, gender, sexuality, and identity. In earlier bodies of work, he appropriated and altered collectible imagery associated with Norman Rockwell, using collage, decalcomania, assemblage, satire, exaggeration, and sexual innuendo to construct narratives that depart from the heteronormative ideals embedded in nostalgic representations of American life. His more recent material research shifts the emphasis toward the physical possibilities of clay, but the same interest in challenging established categories remains evident in the way he treats the vessel as a conceptual form rather than simply a functional container.
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