_Bio Annaliese Rosa Brown is a multidisciplinary artist who holds a bachelor’s degree in fine arts from Massey University in New Zealand. Their work has been shown in several solo and group exhibitions in both New Zealand and Canada, where they lived for two years, working with the ceramist Pascale Girardin. For the past several years, Annaliese Rosa has also worked in the field of art therapy.
_Approach In mystical Jewish practice, a golem is a being made of clay, conceived to carry out a precise task. Ideally, this being is created for the good of the community, but like the people who create it, it is intrinsically imperfect. Whereas this object is often falsely interpreted and seen as a symbol of chaos and destruction, Annaliese Rosa Brown brings it back to its true aims: to protect, heal and create. For the artist, sculpting golems is a way of understanding the individual and their place in a community. Even though they designs them with their own reflection in mind, their final objective is to give space to anyone struggling to evolve, with their self, in a variety of places, cultures and diasporas.
_Project During the symposium, Annaliese Rosa Brown will create three large clay golems. These anthropomorphic self-supporting sculptures will have two arms, two legs, undefined faces and holes for eyes; some, perhaps all, will have only one breast. Windows, doors, rooms, stairways and bridges will be placed inside each of the three golems, generating through their clay bodies connections, passage-ways and welcoming spaces within which there will take shape a community of smaller golems.
In the end, the three large terra cotta sculptures will call to mind towers, trees and groups of residences, on the border between the real and the invented.
Photo credits: Olive Grant
