Responding to the essay ‘The Silver Pin’ (Susan Rubin Suleiman, pp. 184-192), from Sherry Turkle’s book Evocative Objects: Things to Think With, guest artist Charlotte Brown discusses work with Fay Ballard, Martha Orbach and Nick Kaplony in relation to the idea of the family heirloom.
Charlotte Brown’s work utilises printmaking – etching and more recently, stone lithography, collage, cast lead sculpture and hand embroidery to explore the weight and worth of family relationships through objects. She employs traditional techniques which are often laborious and painstaking in their execution to explore themes of familial inheritance and relationships, invested objects and heirlooms, and Freudian psychologies. She enjoys printmaking as an iterative and reproductive process which reinforces ideas surrounding generational inheritance of physical traits and objects.