Burnt Offerings

AUSTEN BRANTLEY

Exhibition on view March 20th - April 11th, 2026

Opening Reception:
Friday, March 27th | 6 - 9 PM

Burnt Offerings is a solo exhibition that centers clay not simply as material, but as ritual. Across sculptural works formed through hand, heat, fracture, and endurance, the exhibition treats the firing process as an act of surrender—where intention is given over to flame, time, and chance. What emerges is not control, but transformation. 

In this body of work, clay becomes a universal offering: shaped by the artist, altered by fire, and completed through the presence of the viewer. The kiln functions as both crucible and altar, echoing ancestral practices where objects were sacrificed to fire as a means of communication—between the living and the dead, the material and the spiritual, the present and inherited memory. 

The sculptures bear visible evidence of this passage. Surfaces crack, glaze blooms unpredictably, figures appear compressed or suspended, as if carrying the weight of heat and history simultaneously. These marks are not imperfections but records—proof that the work has endured something. Each piece holds the residue of risk, loss, and survival, mirroring generational narratives carried within Black diasporic experience. 

Burnt Offerings invites viewers to slow down and witness clay as a vessel of ancestral continuity. The works do not demand interpretation; instead, they ask for recognition. To stand before them is to encounter an object that has already been tested by fire—one that offers itself fully, without guarantee, and remains.