I am a Professor of Visual Arts at Virginia Tech, where I have made art, taught, and lived for about a 1000 years. In fact, I've been doing it so long that I've become kind of like a paleontology site. Put down a trowel, bring up a little piece of something, brush it off, and see what you've got. It'll probably be interesting.

 

My interests range widely and sometimes deeply (or at least obsessively). I love to look at things, make things, figure out how to make things work, especially things that have strong visual qualities. I'm over the moon with questions about how things got to be the way they are. Things, things, things. It's all about things. Materials, light, history, what we can see and what we can't. What we know and what we don't. And of course it's about people most of all. The ones we love, the ones we think about, the ones we don't know what to do with.

 

Here in website land I'm putting forward some of the work I've done that I still like. Most recently (meaning since most of my current students were born) I've been doing installation and media based projects. Before then (meaning when my daughter was the age that my students are now) I did mostly photographic projects and made books. Before then (meaning when my daughter was a little kid) I did mostly paintings, photographic projects, and drawings. Before then (meaning before my daughter arrived on the planet) I did mostly drawings.

 

Through all this time, since I was a young adult, I've been teaching my students and trying to share with them what I've been learning as life rolls along. A sweet adventure.

 

And, oh yes, there's the university and its complicated ways. But that's a different website.

 

/ Carol Burch-Brown

 

In August 2013 several of the artists working on Salt Marsh Suite spent a week collecting data, mostly in the water.

 

Singing Darwin: An Collaborative, Intermedia Arts Project


Singing Darwin began with the act of reading aloud and improvising music and imagery for the text of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species. The technologically complex project grew to include many correlated events and activities, culminating in an exhibition and 24-hour performance-art event in November, 2009. The piece marked the 150th anniversary of the publication of Darwin's masterwork, On the Origin of Species and was an extended, participatory rendering of the whole 490 page text in a created, artistic environment.

 

Collaborators include:

Elise Witt | Ann Kilkelly | Celeste Miller | Normando Ismay | Virginia Schenck | Whitney Waller | Todd Stafford

Photos from drag shows at the Shamrock Bar, Bluefield, West Virginia, 1997-2000.

Photographs from Trailers, by Carol Burch-Brown and David Rigsbee, University Press of Virginia, 1996

Narrative Paintings, 1988-1996
Drawings done from 1979-1988