Joanna Brown is a visual artist, activist and mathematician whose work encompasses photography, artists’ books, sculpture, ceramics and printmaking, and often incorporates a strong collaborative element.
With a passion for learning and cross-disciplinary thinking, she has a PhD in Mathematics and Mechanical Engineering, an MA in Fine Art and an MSc in Architecture: Energy and Environmental Studies.
As an artist, she creates work to explore; to express thoughts and ideas through intuition, play and observation, encountering in the process a tension between freedom and control which energises her practice. Her projects are as varied as her interests. Uniting many of them is her desire to draw out connections and patterns and hence deepen understanding, while retaining a backdrop of mystery and the unknown.
Joanna has recently published an artist’s book entitled Jesus. She brought it together over a 10 year period: commissioning paintings from Nebiyu Assefa (Ehtiopia), interspersing them with her photographs from Israel and Palestine, and writing the text and overseeing the translation into Arabic and Hebrew. A selection of the paintings and photographs from this project were shown at the 2017 Just Festival in Edinburgh and the 2018 Bloxham Festival of Faith and Literature.
Her other artistic work includes the Twentyeight Fingers project, which was shown in the Royal Academy, the National Trust, and at Dean Clough in 2012–2013. From 2015 to 2016, montages from her ARKive project were part of the Whatever the Weather exhibition at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum, Exeter (RAMM). More recently, in 2017, supported by the Arts Council, her three flood projects were exhibited at the 7th International Conference on Flood Management and at Dean Clough.
In addition to the Jesus book, she has conceived, edited, designed and published two other artist’s books: Twentyeight Fingers and Coffee, which are in the National Art Library at the V&A and the Tate’s Artist Book collection.
She has also been an artist-in-residence with the National Trust in Devon (2012–13), on the 23:57 Project at Fuse in Bradford (2015), and at the University of Leeds (2017). Between 2013 and 2015 she received support from the Seedbed Trust, and from 2013 to 2017 she was part of the Contemporary Art Panel at RAMM.
Joanna Brown will be presenting her exhibition Jesus in the Allotment Gallery on Saturday 25 August, 1pm – 5pm