Jackie Brookner
Jackie Brookner was an ecological artist, writer, and educator. She worked with ecologists, design professionals, engineers, communities, and policy-makers on water remediation/public art projects for parks, wetlands, rivers, and urban stormwater runoff. In these projects, local resources become the focal point of community collaboration and collective creative agency.
Brookner lived in New York City and worked and lectured internationally.
Education
Brookner was born in Providence, Rhode Island, and received her B.A. from Wellesley College. She completed all work for a Ph.D. in Art History from Harvard University, except the dissertation, as her focus shifted to making sculpture in 1971. In 1975 she assisted steel sculptor Isaac Witkin in Bennington, Vermont. The following year, she moved to New York City and attended the New York Studio School, where she studied drawing with Nicolas Carone.Early work
Brookner's landscape-scale ecological art evolved from her sculptures and installations from the 1980s and early 1990s. In the early 1980s at Oscarsson Hood Gallery in New York, Brookner exhibited cast bronze sculptures that were based on the movement of water and growth in plants. In 1987, she began juxtaposing materials such as soil, velvet, inner tubes, pillow stuffing, exhaust pipes, and chiffon to explore the psychological and gendered associations these materials carried.Soil works
In the early 1990s, Brookner's writing focused on how our materialistic culture could be so at war with the matrix of its own matter, the Earth. Using soil as a metaphor for raw matter in her wall pieces and Soil Chairs, she investigated the cultural associations of dirt, excrement, sex, and death. In her museum installations, Brookner focused on historical relationships of soil in particular regions.''Of Earth and Cotton'' (1994–98)
This project traveled from 1994 to 1998 to the following venues: McKissick Museum, Columbia, South Carolina ; Diggs Gallery, Winston-Salem State University, North Carolina ; The Hunter Museum of Art, Chattanooga, Tennessee ; The Columbus Museum, Columbus, Georgia ; University of North Texas Art Gallery, Denton, Texas ; The National Civil Rights Museum, Memphis, Tennessee ; Gallery 210, University of Missouri, St. Louis, Missouri. The project evolved as it crossed the southern U.S. to follow the migration of the Cotton Belt from the Carolinas westward. At each location, Brookner spoke with former cotton farmers who hand-picked cotton in the 1930s and 1940s, as she modeled portraits of their feet with local soil. These became the focal points of installations where they rested on 60-tons of soil or 2,500-pounds of ginned cotton. Accompanying the installation was a video documenting Brookner's conversations and forty Farm Security Administration photographs from the 1930s depicting the living and working conditions of cotton farmers during the Depression.''Native Tongues'', Miro Foundation, Barcelona, Spain (1997)
While listening to the Castillian and Catalan languages, Brookner imagined the shapes of the tongues speaking them. She then sculpted Castillian and Catalan tongues from soils collected in central Spain and Catalonia, respectively. The same soils were used to make a 50-foot wall-drawing based on phonetics diagrams that map where the tongue is placed to make specific sounds. This sound, sculpture, and drawing installation explored the corporeality of speech in the context of Catalonia where regional languages, prohibited and politicized under Franco's regime, intersect with homeland, territory, and power.Biosculptures
Brookner was guest editor of the College Art Association's Art Journal on "Art and Ecology". Her research for this issue inspired her to develop a practice that could provide ecological benefits and help transform cultural values.This research led Brookner to develop her Biosculptures: living water filtration systems that unite the conceptual and aesthetic capacities of sculpture with ecological function. These sculpted wetland ecosystems are made of mosses and plants growing on stone and concrete substrates, while the water they filter is inhabited by fish, snails, plants, and other organisms. Together they form a complete ecosystem. The plants and the bacteria that live in their root zones convert waste and pollutants in the water into food for their own metabolism, demonstrating that in healthy natural systems there is no waste. Conceptually, the entropic, symbiotic relationship serves to reveal "the creativity of detritus, showing that decay is part of creation.
The first Biosculpture, Prima Lingua, was commissioned in 1995 by Appalachian State University for the exhibition "Views From Ground Level, Art and Ecology in the Late Nineties." It is a large tongue that licks and cleans the polluted water in which it stands. I’m You, commissioned in 2000 by Wave Hill, Bronx, New York, for the exhibition "Abundant Invention," resembles human hands but is based on microscopic moss structures.
In her Biosculptures and other works, Brookner frequently uses imagery where parts of the body stand for the whole. This reflects the paradox of how humans consider themselves as independent wholes even though we are actually parts of an interdependent universe.