Brooks Oliver

Artist Statement

The ambition of my work is to reimagine and reinterpret the familiar functional vessel. By isolating, altering, and exploiting the necessary components of a vessel, I attempt to provide new visions of utilitarian ceramic wares. No matter the situation, my experience with education, family dynamics, and social settings has left me with the general impression that most people tend to adopt a binary-like “black and white” mentality or way of thinking about various subjects. Despite this I have always felt uncomfortable with thinking in binary terms and find myself fascinated with and imbedded into, what I call, the “charged grey area” between the black and white. In fact, my life as a gay person is all about living in a charged grey area. Society often sets up the binaries of “man” and “woman” but I like to think queer individuals somehow bridge this gap. While many gay people do identify as either man or woman, the gender stereotypes surrounding these binaries (especially in regard to love and gender roles), are often blurred by the queer individual. While my work might not always directly reference my identity in the LGBT community, my aesthetics and thought process are certainly informed by it. My work inherently blurs the boundaries between craft, design, industry, and technology as the charged grey areas between binaries inspire me. By marrying the production techniques of CAD software and rapid prototyping technologies with the creation techniques of the hand, a unique dialog can be formed between the digital and clay that ultimately influences both ways of making.