Interior Motives
columbia artist Brittany Watkins transforms the greenville center for creative arts
by angie toole thompson
A lone chair on the sidewalk, stacks of defunct electronics, trash bags burst open—multi-disciplinary artist Brittany Watkins sees everyday personal refuse in an unconventional light. “We fill our voids with stuff,” she explains, her tone charged with subtext. For Watkins, stuff is a loaded term. It’s both the target and the substance of her high-concept artworks, which take on the effects of consumption on our habits, socio-economic standing, and mental states. She keeps a perpetual eye out for the ephemera that comprise her installations and paintings, ever speculating on the very complicated relationship that humans have with stuff.
Mixing and smearing layers of paint on a mélange of everyday objects in her arresting art installations, Brittany Watkins examines the complex relationship that people have with material things.
When Watkins shows up at an installation site, it is often with only a concept, raw materials, and gut instinct. “The installations are built on-site,” says Watkins. Typically, she will visit the streets and neighborhoods surrounding a site, gathering objects solely from that area. “While I love that approach, it’s not always feasible,” she admits. “[It’s] really limiting, especially with three days for an install.” So she supplements, bringing along finished “remnant” works composed of previously deconstructed installations—a solution that serves to sharpen her core ideas.
Watkins draws on more than a decade of experience to formulate her conceptual work. After completing her master of arts at FSU Tallahassee, serving as a guest lecturer, and teaching art at the university level, Watkins has found her current footing as director at the Goodall Gallery in Columbia, South Carolina.
Portrait of the artist; Greenville Center for Creative Arts will feature Brittany’s work in the exhibition, Impermanence & Abject Space, through November 27.
As for aspirations? There’s the professional—“I would love to find [agency] representation. It seems like a dream.” And, of course, there’s the conceptual. Watkins dreams of manufacturing permanence out of her typically transitory installation works. “What I would really love to do,” says Watkins, “is to get access to some kind of waste plant.” The idea itself is a natural iteration of her process, another way to examine, as she says in her artist statement, “the emotional, physical, and political detritus that overflows in present-day America.”
“what I would really love to do is to get access to some kind of waste plant.”
A key material in the makeup of a Brittany Watkins installation is paint: layers and layers of paint. “I’m really interested in how paint functions in our society. Not just in the context of art history, but also in vernacular life.” As Watkins prepares her upcoming exhibition at the Greenville Center for Creative Arts, she takes the opportunity to further explore the material. Watkins’s previous installations were characterized by giant shocks of color bordering on monochromatic. “For this show, I’m doing a lot more mixing and smearing.”
The exhibition, titled Impermanence & Abject Space, is a contemplation on the relationship between internal experience and the external world. “This will be a one-of-a-kind experience,” says GCCA’s gallery director, Ben Tarcson, “[deepening] our community’s understanding of this medium while opening up a dialogue surrounding abstract concepts where consciousness and culture collide.” Watkins references psychology and the self through this work. “I’m interested in our ability to mediate or shift our own consciousness,” she says, “in highlighting the impermanence of the thought, the feeling, the situation.”
Photography courtesy of Brittany Watkins; this story appears in our Fall 2024 issue.