Madeline Zuzevich
Interview with Antonia Phoebe Brown
Antonia Phoebe Brown’s work is metamorphic, extending beyond its physicality to recall a shift in material states of being. She lives between Cape Town and Brussels, and her sculptural practice develops through writing and performance. Her sculpture, The stain was a thinking (Moon flower) I, is featured on the Issue 53 cover. Here, a moonflower is replicated through the application of dyed rice paper on a steel framework—a textural dichotomy that serves as the impetus for our dialogue on materiality.
Brown and I worked in her Brussels studio last summer as I assisted on upcoming shows Heavy Air at Netwerk Aalst and Winged Complexion at Union Pacific in London. We met through the gallery scene in Brussels two years prior, and produced work in unison and independently in her Molenbeek studio, where she taught me how to make mirrors and dye silks using natural tannins. Circulating and exchanging literature became a stimulating force within our studio practice; as I developed my fall syllabus for a course on poetry and prose at NYU, we discussed texts that would sever traditional academic models, valuing experimental works over conventional, often sterile approaches to creative composition. She consulted a variety of medieval documents, liturgical scores, and works of poetry as she prepared for a series of upcoming exhibitions that fall.
Books, in general, seemed to generate and multiply across our desks. I began to notice how language played a quintessential role in the conceptualization and production of her work. At the same time, I observed a parallel between my views on language as a material state, and the actual, physical materials that composed the sculptures we worked on. This observation called into question the nature of materiality, all forms of composition, and the feeding of one medium into another.
WASHINGTON SQUARE REVIEW: In The stain was a thinking (Moon flower) I, rice paper is stretched over steel, an image reminiscent of material torsion. The sculpture also comprises caput mortum, oxide, manilla copal, and gum arabic. In the studio, we often discussed the historical and symbolic memory of a material and its process, often within a gendered framework. I remember foraging through public parks to collect flowers for natural pigment, or locating the heartbeat of the sewing machine below my feet. These acts felt distinctly feminine, recalling histories of medicine and garment making. How does gender insert itself within the materials and methods you use? Why is the history of a material significant?
ANTONIA PHOEBE BROWN: In my most recent work, I’m considering how—in both personal and political dimensions—there is a transference/transmission through the matrilineal. One level through which I explore the matrilineal is a sense of “afterness” to what is inherited or passed down in terms of feminine artistic practice. Within my work, I’ve been looking to crinoline and corset making for devices of sculptural thinking. In this sense, I look to codes within these garments to explore the dichotomy between adornment and violence. This space of reentry and repetition offers a way of undoing, disrupting, and distorting. I am curious about what distortion offers as a device. But I use different dyeing processes throughout my work. Dyes and pigments are intrinsically bound to extractive logics, just as many flowers are. I generally stay close to these histories when working with the effect and movement of colour. In The stain was a thinking, I looked to how plants can be approached as both containers and surrogates of histories surrounding dislocation. Caput mortum translates as “dead head”—the pigment is thought to have derived from embalmed remains.
WSR: Translation and etymology is such a large part of a material’s symbological history. Ultimately, I think my interest here stems from the small breaths that occur between language and the physical objects it becomes bound to. Your latest exhibition, Heavy Air, resituates a phrase used in the title of Anne Boyer’s essay concerning the fatality of capitalism. “The Heavy Air,” published in The Yale Review, explores the 24-hour, apocalyptic project of capital greed, and the unevenly distributed and terminal consequences of ecocide on the working class. When did you encounter this essay, and how does it apply to the sculptures featured at Netwerk Aalst?
APB: Heavy Air was a project consisting of two parts; an installation and a performance with a boys’ choir. Boys’ choirs, as a formation, interested me because of how they are portrayed as channels to the divine or angelic, ultimately serving as expressions of gendered purity. I was interested in the impersonal effect that comes through this form of chorus—how in this stance of voice (collective, boy voice), there is an attempt to eradicate all traces of the body. I was curious about a voice that runs counter to self-transparency, sense, and presence, and how this is perhaps an instrument towards European-rooted pathologies of “innocence.” Very early on, I was thinking of an implied shattering that would come from this meeting of a soprano tone and mirrors; this paradox of the impersonal and an excess of presence. I read Anne Boyer’s text quite late into the process, and the disembodied image in her writing echoed much of what I was thinking. Around the same time, I encountered Boyer’s text; I discovered these sheets of hand-beaten lead at an herborist (which I used in the show)—a material echo of Boyer’s concerns. In the text, she draws an analogy between air and lead; I found a shared curiosity in this interplay between the saturnine and angelic body.
WSR: In the essay, Boyer frequently references wings, which further reiterates this notion of the “disembodied image.” She quotes Plato in Phaedrus: “The natural function of the wing is to soar upwards and carry that which is heavy up to the place where dwells the race of the gods. More than any other thing that pertains to the body it partakes of the nature of the divine.” There is a relationship between a material state (here, the wing—but I’m also thinking of language) and the air it interacts with. I’m curious if this metaphor played a role in the title of your exhibition at Union Pacific in London: Winged Complexion.
APB: Yes, totally. I guess both the title and the works themselves are held in a suspension of having a potential to be lifted, but are ultimately pulled down by what she refers to as “the vulgar obstacle of earth.” This vertical image was shifted in the work titles, which were bound in a horizontal mirroring, yet also dependent on “sound(s) made in air.”
The sculptures from Winged Complexion are titled as follows:
Oh there to let it lie oh
Oh angle idle Idle angel oh
Oh wing world oh
Oh struck streak oh
Oh knots into me Me into knots oh
Oh red glint Glint red oh
Oh through and through oh
WSR: How striking—they read like a poem, particularly through that anaphoric, ever-Romantic “Oh.” How does poetry—or literature as a whole—define and reconfigure your sculptural praxis?
APB: Poetry is often the only thing I can read while I’m producing work. I stay particularly close to various works by Lisa Robertson, such as 3 Summers and The Baudelaire Fractal. I guess it’s needed for points of congestion that can occur when getting bound up with materiality.
WSR: I feel this way after composing too many poems—the urgency to produce a sculptural work through physical labor. I’m thinking of the relationship between text and object in your previous exhibitions, like Sway Foul in Madrid, that feature the poetry of Kate Briggs. Accompanying your piece “Tournere,” the 18th-century steel garment, she writes: “The tensions are internal.” This line recalls a conflict intrinsic to the notion of “transformation,” which implies a natural tension between physical materials as they undergo revision or reconstruction. I also think of the title of Anne Boyer’s book, Garments Against Women.
APB: The work you’re referring to was an homage to Christina Ramberg. I replicated a photo of a steel pannier underskirt I found in her image archive. When I produced this body of work, Kate and I had been thinking together about a book project, so it was obvious to invite her into dialogue with the sculptures I was working on for Sway Foul. In our conversations about the show, Kate brought forward Alice Notley’s poem titled “Songs for the second unborn baby.” I introduced Kate to Ramberg’s way of drawing two images through each other, so that a third emerged. A sense of “afterness” became paramount to the conversation we were having.
The two poems Kate wrote—“Song for the Ferment” and “Song for the Frame”—with their various evocations of “I” and “she” pointed to many internal tensions between us, the work, and the voices we were addressing at the time. I am very curious about what opens up—this bending of modes of address, as well as a conjuring of movement, that comes from the proximity of poetry and sculpture.