An amazing conversation with Bisila Noha & Simone Brewster

Bisila is an artist working predominantly with clay, with a background in Translation and International Relations. She writes about ceramics, crafts, identity and design, and has a particular interest in the contributions of women of colour to the history of art and craft. Her words are a bridge bringing the past - the forgotten, the ignored, and the belittled - to the present.

Bisila suggested we are joined in conversation by artist, designer & cultural change-maker Simone Brewster. Strongly grounded in craft, Simone’s practice includes painting, sculpture, jewellery and writing, Using her creative outputs as her voice, celebrating and sharing windows into varied Black female narratives and histories. The threads that flow throughout her work display a balance of function with beauty, a repurposing of the “ethnic” and the “western” and a continuous playing with scale, materiality and architectural form.

Links

Bisila Noha Instagram

Simone Brewster Instagram

Bisila’s blog post about translation

Bisila Noha Baney clay project

Negress and Mammy

Woman In Parts

Simone’s solo exhibition

Spirit of Place

V&A porcelain sugar holder

Ursula K le Guin, Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction

Elizabeth Fisher's best-known work is Women's Creation: Sexual Evolution and the Shaping of Society. The 7th chapter The Carrier Bag Theory of Evolution inspired Le Guin

Lydia Yuknavich talking about The Carrier Back Theory of Fiction

Frank Gehry, a Canadian architect, famously said, “Decoration is a sin, expression is in materials”

Truth to materials - ‘A belief that the form of a work of art should be inseparably related to the material in which it is made’.

Slow Motion Multi Tasking, Tim Harford

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