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Degree Show 2021

STATEMENT 

Iona Brown is an interdisciplinary artist with a focus on sculpture. She researches and visually interprets her findings through selective mediums and techniques, specifically those of contrasting beauty and brutality. Her installations portray spaces of uncertainty and vulnerability, which may feel uncomfortable to witness. Brown focuses on birds and their symbolic power as ornaments of desire. She seeks to reveal the cruel manner in which humans domesticate, objectify and hold animals hostage as decorations within their homes. This body of work explores the nature of the down feather industry, with a defined interest in the welfare of geese and live plucking.

Using flesh, eggs, pearls and bronze, Brown exposes the conflicting relationship humans have with desire and ethics. Her sculptural objects are at once beautiful and confrontational as they encapsulate fragments of nature in a space between comfort and vulnerability. Brown makes use of destructive processes such as bronze casting but approaches her medium with conscious gentleness to expose the fragility of her subject.

Using her own body to perform through film and photography, Brown makes connections between birds and the female body; the birds’ suffering, rendered vulnerable by live plucking, alludes to the naked female body. Luxury and desire is met with violence and the grotesque, capturing the onlooker in a conflict of shock and awe.

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