Brooke Burnside: Geography, Position, and Memory

By Hayley Labrum Morrison

The vibrant and surreal architectural-inspired chalk drawings of Brooke Burnside had me swooning at Mass Gallery’s three-person show, These Lessons last fall. As I followed Brooke’s work into quarantine, throughout the spring, and into summer, I noticed a distinct and stunning shift. The media and imagery Brooke is experimenting with are so fresh, heartfelt, and visually breathtaking that reaching out to her for an interview was a no-brainer.

Brooke was born and raised in Nassau, Bahamas. She came to the U.S. in pursuit of a Bachelor of Arts in Film from Vassar College, which was followed by a Master of Arts in Media, Culture, and Communication from New York University and (very) recently, a Master’s degree from The University of Texas at Austin’s School of Architecture. Brooke's work explores geography, position, memory, and the transgressive potential in abstract documentation through drawing, ceramics, collage, and printmaking. Read on for a closer look at these fascinating topics and Brooke’s exciting foray into a new medium.

Hayley Labrum Morrison (HLM): Time for the back-story. Where did you grow up? And when and how did you get into art?

Brooke Burnside (BB): I was born and raised in The Bahamas. I came to the states when I started undergrad and have been back and forth ever since.

I’ve sort of done a stupid amount of school since starting undergrad, including studying film and architecture which have both bled into my artwork. I also took after-school art classes for a few years in high school, so I’d say I have a mixture of formal and self-guided training. The art classes I took growing up were really helpful in introducing me to working with various media and ignited a desire in me to always be investigating and learning new techniques. This interest in knowing how things are made or put together likely contributed to me ending up in the field of architecture. 

I also grew up in a creative household, which more than any of the aforementioned experiences, really shaped my path to art. My dad is a painter and did a daily political cartoon for our local newspaper for forty years and was also very involved in our national festival, Junkanoo, and my mom is a talented baker and cake decorator. So I grew up with parents who, on a daily basis, were physically materializing their conceptual ideas. The things they brought into being would then go on to materially affect and often improve the lives of others. And because both of my parents worked from home, I witnessed this process constantly—from the object’s inception to its interaction with others. And of course I was regularly tasked with helping my parents. In some unexpected ways, doing these somewhat banal tasks (like flouring cake pans or gluing decorations to my dad’s costumes) gave me dexterity and an education about material behavior. I was only able to appreciate and think of this kind of childhood as special once I was firmly out of it. I knew it was always a bit different, but in the moment, it was work. It was what my parents did. What they had to do to feed me and my brothers. So this also gave me a pretty aromantic relationship with art, for which I have come to be grateful. 

HLM: How does your work typically go from conception to completion?

BB: My process is a bit more amorphous than I’d like and tends to differ with each medium in use. I try to do quite a bit of sketching and planning for the drafting process of my pastel drawings. Once I have a plan for the drawing I want to explore—view, perspective, subjects, etc.—I spend a couple full days at my drafting desk drawing it out before I begin with the pastel. Introducing the pastels is always a potentially messy process so the work of making sure my drawing is set beforehand is pretty important.

The process for my linocuts so far has also involved a fair amount of planning with a combination of photo-manipulation and sketching to get the composition I want on the plate before I begin carving. A lot of my analog and digital collage work is faster and more improvised. I find myself moving back and forth between working carefully and working quickly. 

HLM: How about the conceptual side of the process?

BB: With each project, I'm trying to investigate, unpack, and abstractly document themes borne out of my position as a Black woman from a small island nation now living in the United States under what has often felt like tenuous circumstances. I am also fully aware that this position is not unique to me, nor does it exist in a vacuum. So in my work I’m often thinking about the broader issues that shape a position and experience such as mine, in addition to the feelings that exist as ramifications of it.

To this end, a lot of my work comes down to control: Trying to assert or regain some of the control that is out of my hands due to how I look, where I was born, or the rate at which the world is heating up. I think color is certainly one of the tactics I use but I also like the challenge of attempting to control media that are often unpredictable. Like making chalk pastel and watercolor function in a more hard-lined or rigid way or making my clay work, which is naturally fragile, suspend itself or behave acrobatically. I  think a lot of art comes down to control though. If only for the fact that pretty much everything does. 

HLM: Tell me more about how your creative path led you to where you are today. Did you always know what you wanted to do?

BB: While I grew up around a lot of artists, I never considered myself one until very recently. I still really struggle with it though I’ve come to realize this is not so interesting. But I think this struggle came from a combination of the aromantic view of art I grew up with and then just the classic trite desire to be something different than your parents. I always had creative inclinations but explored non-”artist” routes over the years such as film, writing, and even arts administration, thinking that working alongside artists would adequately scratch that itch. To be honest, I also simply did not know how to translate my ideas or creative inspiration into visual art on my own terms and outside of it being something done to help my parents or other artists or assigned to me in a class.

It wasn't until I got a scholarship to do the Harvard summer architecture program that I began to figure out how to do this. The program was super introductory and taught basics like what a section is and how to draft different kinds of graphic projections, build physical models, and begin using language to explain what we’d done and why. This program, coupled with my later architectural education, gave me the tools to materialize ideas I’ve probably always had into visual art. The way architecture school trained me to work iteratively, identify variables in a process, and work on a project for many, many hours at a time completely shaped my approach to art-making. 

HLM: Speaking of architecture, I’ve got some questions about your architectural chalk drawings—you know I’m obsessed.

How did you decide to dive into the hand-drafting side of Architecture?

BB: Learning about architectural hand-drafting was one of the things that excited me the most when I began to learn about the practice of architecture and it is something I continue to be endlessly fascinated by. I was and am still incredibly interested in both its history and potential as a form of communication when words fail (which they often do when trying to communicate spatial information!) and that it is a tradition as old as time. I loved the idea of being able to apply certain graphical rules that have been in place for centuries to two-dimensionally materialize and communicate three-dimensional ideas. 

HLM: HOW do you so cleanly manipulate charcoal pastels? The lines are flawless.

BB: I began doing architectural chalk pastel drawings in grad school after submitting an incredibly bad one for an assignment. I became somewhat consumed by the possibility of getting better at this thing I had just been so publicly bad at and it gave me the opportunity to also continue exploring and challenging myself to learn more techniques and strategies for architectural drafting. I LOVE learning new graphical tricks and ways of drafting different spatial projections. I am really interested in what the manipulation of rules can achieve and the generative potential in the mistakes. 

HLM: What draws you to architectural shapes?

BB: So much of what I’m thinking about and unpacking with my work deals with geography. I find the use of architectural imagery and the creation of what are essentially landscapes to be fruitful subject matter. The fact that architectural drawings are pieces of paper containing incredibly consequential information interests me. I am one of many people who have been dependent on possessing various documents in order to move through the world, which comes back to the control thing again. The medium of paper controls so much in this world.

HLM: how do you translate the physical reality of structure to such imaginative drawings?

BB: My inventing or documenting landscapes is a way of creating site in an effort to combat complicated feelings connected to home, rootedness, or path. The latter of which is often out of my control or controlled by papers I do or do not possess. The fact that architecture is inherently about control, and has been since the beginning of time, is not lost on me.  Assertion of control and claim-staking have been major purposes of architecture—often in nefarious ways—since the beginning of time. These issues are also inescapably embedded in the tradition of architectural drafting. For certain people, knowing how to read and draw plans and sections was at times a form of literacy far more accessible and acceptable than knowing how to read or write the english language. So, I try to work with awareness of the countless Black people and people of color who drew and built “historic” sites on university campuses and capital cities and received no credit or compensation for their work.

HLM: The prints you have been creating recently are stunning. Are they largely linocut?

BB: Thank you, I really appreciate that! They are all linocuts, yes. I’d been interested in printmaking for some time, but had always and still feel in many ways completely mystified by a lot of the processes.

HLM: You have worked in film, chalk pastels, clay, metal, digital collages, and so on. How has printmaking captured your interest at this point in time?

BB: Yeh I’m sometimes not sure what to make of my short attention span when it comes to the media I work with. But I do find switching media to be a useful method for me to avoid getting stuck not making anything, which is just not good for my mental health. With printmaking, I was really drawn to the opportunity to work with softer, more organic, and gestural forms and I kind of like the almost perverse idea that the object I put most of the actual work into—the linoleum plate—doesn’t need to be pretty or have its own aesthetics considered. Maybe I’m missing out on something there though! But on a very practical level, I like being able to work the image on the plate before carving and not care if my lines get smudged or if I have to draw over some areas. I try to avoid this kind of “messiness” with my drawings. I am pretty critical and distrustful of my hand without a straight edge (something I really need to work on) so being able to work the image on the linoleum as much as necessary before carving is really appealing. It’s also an interesting inversion of how I usually work because it’s subtractive, so I like the little mental puzzle aspect of it too. 

HLM: How did you get started with printmaking?

BB: I took a linocut printmaking class with local artist and art educator Ariel Spiegelman earlier this year. I learned a lot about printmaking materials and tools and I tried to use the class sessions to not be precious about my work and to experiment as much as possible while I had access to tools and instruction. I just sort of got bitten by the bug and especially fell in love with the process of carving. I think I actually prefer carving to printing and it has been meditative during quarantine.

HLM: Where did you procure your printmaking supplies?

BB: Ariel was kind enough to lend me some tools and has continued to be a great source of information and another local artist named Paloma Mayorga very generously lent me her press. 

HLM: What is it about linocut printmaking that attracted you? Have you encountered any challenges?

I’m simultaneously attracted to and overwhelmed by the experimental possibilities and opportunities of printmaking. It’s exciting for obvious reasons but also daunting because the experiments, once printed, are more or less fixed. It’s similar to my digital collages in that I can iterate quite quickly, but once the print is made, I can’t change it. That ability to quickly make a lot of work, essentially in its final form, is new and sometimes a bit unsettling to me. Speedy replication is obviously precisely the point of printmaking, but I really struggle with it! 

HLM: Your imagery has shifted with your exploration of printmaking. Tell us about the concepts behind your prints.

BB: Yeah, the opportunity to explore new imagery with printmaking has been interesting to me. 

Throughout the making of my pastel drawings I had been passively thinking about the implications of introducing literal personhood to my work and what it meant that my work had before been completely absent of it. I was excited to find a medium that allowed me to really play with that. The imagery of these prints deals overtly with Black femme-hood, agency, and themes of visibility. I pay particular attention to the subject’s hair and clothing—I’m thinking about braiding, weaving, and the wide variety of meanings that these styles and patterns carry. They are also often things onto which meanings are thrust. I think about the amount of skill, attention, and care that is often put into the act of braiding and try to approach my act of carving the braids in a similar way. I am also a Black girl who is not very good at braiding! So I think there is an aspirational aspect to my carving as well. 

I have an extremely fraught relationship with my hair—I always have. But I know, and work to remind myself, that much of this tension is due to Eurocentric standards designed precisely, in part, to make me feel this way. So, I think Black hair is a rich text, though in many ways by mechanisms that we have/had no control over. These braided looks are controversial in some spaces, but are actually potentially restorative to our hair and there is agency in them. This is of interest to me because what is actually good for our hair is often socially unacceptable. 

HLM: Are the print portraits of specific women?

BB: They’re not of specific women and I try to privilege a point of view that showcases the subjects’ hair and clothing for reasons we discussed. I’ve been exploring ways of using the prints as a foundational material for other pieces. For example I incorporate images of crumpled test prints into my digital collages and I’ve been experimenting with weaving prints together. 

HLM: Tell me about the most recent piece/experiment you completed.

BB: Because I’ve been learning a new medium, I’m in a bit of a strange place. I’m not making a ton of work that necessarily feels finished right now. I’ve made some prints I feel are successful on their own, but many of them have qualities that I think would be better suited as foundational material for other work. I’ve been in this phase for a few months, which I unsurprisingly have mixed feelings about.

This may be part of why I started my digital collage project “How Sundays Feel.”  It’s a different way of working than my physical/analog work and I appreciate being able to turn documentation of my process or surroundings into something generative. It has also allowed me to complete or resolve work while I remain experimental with new (to me) printmaking media and processes. In architecture school I was often interested in what was created by the “mistakes” I made when I was drawing or rendering. There’s usually not enough time in the moment to explore or dive into the potential of those “mistakes” because the drawings and images need a certain level of legibility in order to communicate your spatial project. “How Sundays Feel” has given me time to play around with that idea a bit more—what can come out of manipulating legibility and the power of suggestion. I can work through ideas pretty quickly and create a lot of iterations without being too precious with my decisions because of the “undo”-able nature of editing technology. I’m also using this alternate media and process to continue working through ideas and feelings of geography, homesickness, memory, and the murkiness of these phenomena. 

HLM: How have your creative habits changed or not changed due to COVID-19?

BB: I don’t think the pandemic has totally changed my creative habits, but I’d say it has made me a bit more manic in terms of production. I think this is from a combination of craving productive distraction, having more time to work on things, and that all this is coinciding with me learning about this new medium (printmaking) in which high-production potential is inherent. 

HLM: Tell us about your creative space.

BB: I make my work at home in an extra room which I now also share with my partner as he has switched to working from home. I do all my drawing, watercolor, pastelling, collage etc., from a somewhat massive drafting desk. I’d been printing outside earlier on in “the quar” when it was cooler but now I throw a tarp over my drafting desk. The printing process is messy and my pastel drawings are not not messy, but do require a clean space, so doing both of these things on the same desk is not ideal. Sometimes just the state of my drafting desk and what’s on it dictates what medium I’ll be working with for a while. But these are small things. 

HLM: Who are some contemporary artists whose work you're really digging in Austin and/or globally?

BB: I’m constantly inspired by the work of Carlos Rosales-Silva and Diego Duran, who I showed with at MASS Gallery last year. And then there are a ton of artists working in The Bahamas that are doing incredible work: Cydne Coleby, Jodi Minnis, Angelika Wallace Whitfield, Tamika Galanis, and Melissa Alcena just to name a very few!

HLM: What non-art things are you engrossed in lately?

BB: These aren't entirely 'non-art things, but I’m completely taken with Michaela Coel’s I May Destroy You series on HBO. I’m in awe every week at all the seemingly cacophonous tones she and the cast manage to bring into harmony. I’m also really enjoying my friend Ashton Graham Cumberbatch’s program “Black is Not a Genre”, happening with Hyperreal Film Club this month. I’ve learned so much from his weekly essays and have enjoyed discovering and revisiting the movies featured. There’s a great podcast competent to the program too. Though I don’t really work in film anymore, I think I’m still heavily inspired by it in terms of how I think about themes, narrative, point of view, and composition.  

Follow Brooke’s experiments in printmaking at @brooklynsidebur and her ongoing digital project, How Sundays Feel, at @how_sundays_feel. See more of Brooke’s design and ceramic work at www.brookeburnside.com.