Myrna Brown
Myrna Brown is an artist based in New Zealand who was born in Chatham, England. Since completing her Bachelor's degree at Auckland's Elam School of Fine Arts, Myrna's oil and acrylic painting practice has grown through her inspirations rooted in familial connection, environments, absence and people.
Artist's statement:
My core practice revolves around oil painting. People and connections are very central to my work as I have completed many portrait commissions of lost loved ones, and from these experiences with patrons I have developed a sense of how painting can become an emotional vessel that breathes life back into things once lost. This began in an early body of work which was based on light pollution and the loss of our connection to the cosmos. In my recent blue painting series I explored how traits transcend through generations, particularly through my female ancestors - the furthest back I traced was Alice Molland, who was the last witch hanged in England. She became a symbol in my work of agency.
The ancestral line reveals threads, fragments of a whole, that accumulate down through time and tale to today. Navigating familial and archival realms, a blue body of paintings are inspired by the furthest female ancestor I could trace back to - Alice Molland, who was the last witch hanged in England.
While her death marked an end to intolerance, Molland is survived only through echoes of her name and in the little record of her life. The paintings are an unspoken narrative, embodying the witch persona to reframe historically condemned acts of hysteria, confession and emotional turbulence as ones of agency and free- will. Paint is witchcraft, creating presence and transforming into a silent testimony to her lost story. ‘Witches’ becomes representative of a population that defied tradition, and Molland is resurrected in the image of myself. The exploration into this part of my ancestry informs my positionality in the contemporary, my identity as a woman, and my own desire for self-expression.
My current work builds on this project: exploring water and the relationship between water bodies and the human bodies. Waves lap and exist only briefly, but continue to exist in the hidden mass beneath them.
