Craft Corner: Billie Brand ‘25

by Birdie Keller

Welcome back to Craft Corner, a space for creative members of the English community to share their incredible work and talent! Today we got to speak with Billie Brand about some of their latest work.

Billie Brand (they/them) is a Minneapolis-based ceramic artist and writer. They create projects exploring themes of foundation, rest, and comfort. They use an experimental approach to a wide range of forms and are interested in the intersections between ceramics, creative writing, and performance. They like to create interactive pieces that are meant to be held and touched. 

Last semester in Emma Törzs’s class “Writer’s Sketchbook: Space and Place,” during the last few weeks of class, each student got to present on any topic of their choosing. Billie presented “Intimate Touch,” an experiential art exhibition that invited the audience to view ceramic objects without sight: through touch, sound, and smell.

More information about Intimate Touch is explained on Billie’s website at billiejunebrand.com:

“Fifteen audience members were blindfolded and asked to observe an object for two minutes with their hands, laps, and in one instance tongue, touching and holding the object however felt comfortable. After two minutes, the audience members kept their blindfolds on and sketched with charcoal, marker, and water anything they observed.

Audience members were never shown the visual form, but were able to view the observations of other audience members.

Intimate Touch invites the audience to become intimate with sculptural objects, creating familiarity and connection without a context or judgment of visual qualities.

This exhibition asks us: What are we missing? How can we find it with our eyes closed?”

A few of the drawings from the exhibition are included in this article! We also got a chance to talk with Billie about this exhibition, experimental ceramics, and how that intersects with their creative writing endeavors.

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Can you share about how your writing, ceramics, and other forms of art intersect?

Before I found ceramics, I was a creative writer. I’ve always been interested in trying to capture these moments or feelings or experiences; and then, when I found ceramics, it was just a new conduct to be able to explore that. So I found myself exploring a lot of the same ideas that I was exploring through writing. They accomplish the same goal.

What kinds of themes or ideas have you been exploring in your art lately?

Right now, building off of the Intimate Touch exhibition, I’ve been really interested in the idea of object intimacy, and why a person might take to an object in a way that feels familiar, even if they haven’t ever experienced the object before, and thinking about that in connection to place: how the things that we like, and the places that we feel safe or familiar, are all tied back to the places that we come from and from our first experiences.

Can you explain the idea behind the Intimate Touch exhibition?

Intimate Touch was this idea that I had last semester. While I was making some objects, I realized I liked them better when my eyes were closed. I felt like I understood more when I was touching them with my eyes closed. I thought about them as “touch objects” as opposed to ceramic objects.

I was thinking about how I could facilitate an experience around that, and how I could circumvent a gallery space where touch and familiarity are pretty discouraged. So I had the idea to create almost an intimate meditation setting.

I had worked with some kids before, teaching classes where you do some sensory deprivation activities, and one thing I found with people being blindfolded is that they are a lot more intuitive with how they touch and how they draw, and so that was something I wanted to tap into, [an] intimate experience without judgment. How do you touch an object if you don’t know what it is, and how do you draw when you don’t know what you’re drawing? [I] feel like that’s a very intimate space, and a very special space, where people can feel that sense of safety and intimacy within their own bodies.

What is the most surprising thing you learned from doing the experiential exhibition with people?

One thing I noticed during the actual exhibition was that people were sort of creating a universal experience from an individualized experience. Particularly when people were talking about how the objects felt, or they were describing one of the objects, there would be people in the room that would agree with them that hadn’t ever felt the objects.

So there’s this concept of not necessarily having touched the same object but having had the same experience.

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 Participating in the experiential exhibition was so incredibly cool, and The Words is grateful to hear about the reflections that Billie has had since the exhibition took place. We can’t wait to see what they do next! Make sure to check out their website at www.billiejunebrand.com