THE OVERTURES

Brynn Hurlstone and the Traces of Impact

Our 2024 October Resident

by Miden Wood

Every month, we’re going to do an interview with our resident artist. Brynn Hurlstone is Da Vinci Art Alliance’s resident artist for the month of October. 

“What I can do is set up scenarios in which people are asked to step out of their comfort zone and engage with something that makes them nervous. And glass and water and art are all things that make people nervous.”

As L. Elwood (DVAA’s Marketing Coordinator) and I step into the residency studio, we are nervous. We’re nervous because the artist in residence, Brynn Hurlstone, has broken glass all over the floor.

I should say, not directly onto the floor. She’s dropped a glass vessel full of salt water onto a steel plate, and its shards have been strewn about in the resulting splash. “I’ll probably just go in that corner,” I say, laughing, “do a little squat.” After all, this evidence of impact is precisely what Brynn’s work is meant to convey—and our trepidation around the shattered glass is what the piece is meant to invoke.

“We're all so worried about breaking glass all of the time,” Brynn says, as we discuss work, “so it's the perfect stand-in for some sort of calamity or incident or trauma.”

In her current body of work, and as relates to her personal experience, the calamities Brynn intends to evoke are situations of domestic violence, and the traces such violence leaves behind. “I believe that domestic violence is still such a huge issue because we don't talk about it.”

The idea of an incident, and the residue it leaves behind, is precisely what Brynn records in what she calls impact drawings: metal, usually steel, corroded by the imprint of an irreversible event. For example, a recent work entitled Of Precarity and Release invited gallery-goers to step on steel floor panels with rolling glass vessels perched on top of them. Inevitably, the salt water inside the vessel spills out. Left untouched, the chemical reaction—residue of interaction with a viewer—forever changes the plate.

“I was really interested in, not necessarily the idea of solving domestic violence—I don't think that's within my purview—But I think what I can do is set up scenarios in which people are asked to step out of their comfort zone and engage with something that makes them nervous. And glass and water and art are all things that make people nervous.”

“I have… ideas for the work when I start, but it tends to make itself whatever it needs to be, and then other people take it for what they need as well.”

As for the piece here in the residency studio, Brynn has filled glass vessels with text and salt water, and then smashed them onto the steel. “The resulting mess, created by the release of the contents, transforms the steel and leaves some of that sort of paper and text residue on the surface,” she says. “The steel, being like the blank canvas of the original self, transforms through each of these impacts however it's going to.”

“I've removed the coating that's placed onto steel to prevent it from rusting equally on each piece,” Brynn says, pointing to different portions of the piece, “and yet there are parts that have clearly had water on them that have not rusted—and then there are parts that aren't even touching the metal that, because of the sort of leaching process of the metal within the water, have actually transformed as though they're touching steel… Every time I make something, part of the joy that I get from it is the unpredictability and then the little surprises and magic that not only make me excited about that work, but usually get me interested in what I can do next.”

“I love that about art; that, no matter what, you're bringing yourself to it”

These phrases—”however it’s going to,” and “as it wishes”—especially capture the organic and experimental nature of Brynn’s process. Each work is individual and unique, representing the wholly specific mark trauma can leave on someone. The traces of the glass shattering, and of the resulting spill, are untouched by Brynn’s intention or preference—only by the physics and chemistry of physical interaction; of one material exerting force on another. “I got into that a little bit when I was first making work about this topic. It just kept feeling like I was trying to illustrate something rather than really creating the thing I was trying to talk about.”

“I'm really interested in what materials do if I kind of set up a parameter and then allow them to react to one another as they would were I not involved. I think that, to me, that feels more honest in terms of the subject matter I'm dealing with, right? It's very uncontrolled. You can't really predict what's going to happen, and how someone is going to transform through experiences of violence.”

In order to speak to transformation honestly, Brynn has to yield some authority to another medium in her work: Time. “I was really interested in allowing time to be a material that I'm working with.” In doing this, she manages to render different scales of time: the enormity of one cataclysmic moment, bound up with ever-divisible units of transformation. The pieces ask us to consider: What is the true time-scale of violence? Is an impact, discrete though it may seem, ever actually over?

“At Tyler they have this poster that the program had hung up in Glass that just says, ‘Be kind, everyone's going through something that they don't speak about.’ and I think that it fits into that aspect of the human experience.

“My entire personality is a sum of everything that I've been through, but you don't generally know what all of those things are. I think that even in removing the layers of this incidence, the fact that the trace is still there—I may never know what caused it, but I can see that there's something,” Brynn says. “That speaks to me very naturally of Humanity and everything we all deal with And how individual each work is.”

According to Brynn, individual viewers, too, react differently to her work. Some don’t interact at all; some gently nudge it with just a toe; some, especially kids, will run around the pieces practically dancing with them. “It's really funny. I will definitely have the adults in the room tell the young people in the room, ‘No, don't touch that.’” Brynn says, laughing—to which she has to reassure them: “‘No, I'm the artist. They're allowed. It's fine. That's what they're supposed to do.’”

I think about the chain reaction in Brynn’s work—the impact, and resulting micro-events that transform her material—and wonder if the reaction continues as the work is perceived. Each plate, individually changed, evokes a unique interaction with each viewer’s lived experience.

“I have… ideas for the work when I start, but it tends to make itself whatever it needs to be, and then other people take it for what they need as well. I had a friend who was looking at the work who… has PTSD and had experiences from being in the military… It brought him to tears because it represented the way that his mind felt when he tried to think about certain things, and that's what I was getting at, but from a completely different standpoint.

“I love that about art; that, no matter what, you're bringing yourself to it,” Brynn says. “I really enjoy that time and happenstance and abstraction leaves room for everyone.”