Brooke Georgia^[10]

Brooke Georgia is a Christchurch based artist who intuitively works with found materials, responding and reworking to create art and clothing that is at once visceral, vulnerable and raw.

Through the inherent poetics of the collected materials (often times textiles) and the way Brooke manipulates or changes them, the viewer is encouraged to interpret the new meanings and narratives in the same intuitive way in which she works.

Artist Statement –

As the New Zealand writer and academic Jack Ross stated in his latest collection Ghost Stories “We’re most haunted by that which we’ve worked hardest to deny and eradicate from our lives.” Brooke Georgia’s use of found objects, both in her garments and visual art, speaks to this gothic complex due to the way she works with and repurposes abandoned materials. Not only running against the tendencies of fast fashion and its associated wastefulness, this praxis speaks to the mysterious histories of objects, raising the questions of where they come from and what they have seen. The objects already have their own stories and their own weight of being, aside from their material reality, although this can never be directly accessed. 

Rather than turning to the new, Brooke Georgia looks to these pre-existing objects and carefully reworks them, sensitive to their unique individual agency. The mystique associated with these objects emphasises critical aspects of the unknown, because in the gothic imagination the non-human exists within the human and vice versa. As James Pate summarises in Flowers Among the Carrion: Essays on the Gothic in Contemporary Poetry: “we are no longer placed on a pedestal above other phenomena due to History or God or Nature. In the Gothic, we are small beings under the night sky, limited in our knowing and capabilities.”