ARTIST'S STATEMENT

Artist's/Writer's/Person's Statement
Tiffany Lee Brown
August 2006

The creative impulse will hit its chosen artist with a full-body slam, demanding to be manifested as a book, a conceptual performance, a song, a series of newspapers, a game, a guerrilla action, a feast prepared for one thousand invitees. The creative impulse sees no barriers between different media and genres. More importantly, it can channel seemingly disparate elements into the service of a common concept.

I primarily channel the creative impulse through writing, performance, furtive actions, independent publications, online media, music, installations, and events. Ritual acts, collaborative processes, and improvisational experiments figure prominently in my practice. My work explores themes including transformation, language, boundaries, permeability, and ephemerality. I've been an official carrier of a 44% "Permanent Partial Disability Rating" for 15 years (due to fibromyalgia, bipolar disorder, and a severe case of bilateral tendonitis in my arms); now health-related issues are emerging at the forefront of my art, my life, and my daily practice.

Working from personal values of integrity, expansiveness, and responsibility, I hope to effect positive change in the larger world by opening my own little window of experience to audiences and readers. Above all, I strive for the courage to be honest in my work—honest to bashful intimacies and rollicking stories, sweet banalities and exuberant adventures, small-scale achievements and large-scale horrors—honest to all the strange and beautiful things that make us human.