Cynthia Brannvall

Lives and works in Berkeley, CA

Artist statement

My art practice is an exploration of identity, belonging, history, and meaning in materials. The movement of people, resources, and ideas through voluntary and forced migrations are themes that find expression in my work. I use abstraction and nostalgia to create an openness and a soft landing for people to meet and ease into complex conversations about race, labor, history, and slavery. I explore the capacity of materials and aesthetics to create common ground in our shared human experience. I am interested in creating visual language that is engaged individual and collective identities and the history, culture, economies and geographies that they are tethered to. I use historical clothing and textiles as a medium to evoke an interstitial space between craft and fine art, the past and the present, painting and sculpture, landscape and portrait, abstraction and representation, history and the present. I imagine the abstract patterns in the material as protein folds of DNA that cross bodies of water and continents and cross the bodies of ancestors. I intend the textile patterns to evoke text, music, history, and the presence and work of women. My choice in materials and composition strives for a conceptual tension between that which is whole and broken, precious and fragmented using metaphors of the land and the sky as places where we all belong. I am drawn to the complex and entangled histories and constructs of human experience. For me, to be fluent in these margins and...

Artwork