07/18/2026
This coming Friday (6-9pm) and Saturday (4-9pm) we are hosting a small group of artists who work in different media. Bren West is one of those artists, she uses charcoal to draw provocative images from the canvas with color enhancing the narrative. I’ve asked all artists for a statement about their work - this is what Bren shared:
“We are born into landscapes of chance. Charcoal powder and water, onto raw canvas, obey only gravity and grain. They pool and bleed - not as renderings, but as records: maps of accident, memory, and erosion. This is the unstable ground we exist in: gritty, porous, unpredictable - the very texture of a lived life.
Into this terrain, I push a needle, pulling a red thread.
In every piece, the thread performs a dual role: it connects and it punctures. It is a tethering - a lifeline, a suture, a claim. It is the deliberate line against the chaotic wash; the choice made in the face of what we cannot control. These tethers speak of our most human conditions: the bonds that hold us and the tension that defines them.
The red is specific. In my South Asian and African heritage, it echoes protection, ceremony, and ancestry. Here, it guards what is vulnerable and honors what is tied. A tether can save or restrain, ground or confine. It can snap by storm or by our own courageous hand.
This work lives in that tension. It is evident that we are not isolated, but pieces woven together by countless threads. Charcoal remembers what burned. Water carries memory away. The red thread is what we dare to tie between us - proof of our need, our courage, our fragile interdependence. We are all held, for better or worse, within the same fragile web.”
Weighty and compelling! We can’t wait to see Bren’s work live. This is a free event and some items from the artists will be on sale.
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