Artist Biography Page

Christopher Scott Brumfield is a ceramic artist, writer, teacher, and gardener who lives an art life in New Orleans. Inspired by the Flora and Fauna of the environment and the minefield of human culture, Christopher is most recently creating installation/sculpture out of ceramic and found objects. He has taught human beings ranging from middle school students in his home state of Louisiana to collegiate-level art majors in Ireland. Christopher has a BFA in ceramics from Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge and a MFA in Ceramics from Tulane University.



Autobiography...

I wonder what the wisdom is of trying to write anything autobiographical before the age of forty, but here goes. I was born the older half of a set of twins on 1/7/1971 to my parents Rosemary and Beau. I had a magical childhood on Bayou Fountain in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, surrounded by brothers, animals, and love. We spent as many weekends as Mom could manage on the Gulf of Mexico, and as many weekends as my Dad could manage at our apartment in the French Quarter. I grew into a fairly weird little boy who liked Agatha Christie novels and going to garage sales. In Eighth grade I really discovered music and everything changed. The Smiths, Siouxsie, REM, and Kate Bush gave me the first inkling that there was something different, that there was an alternative to the horribleness of school and adults. The summer of my fifteenth year I met a group of people that are still my friends today. For the next four years we were together, dancing, singing, playing, painting, 24 hours a day. I guess that time has more to do with who I am than anything else. When I turned eighteen I quit High School, my Father died, my Mother moved to Munich, Germany, and I followed her a few months later. Munich was a revelation. I was free and very alone. While I was there; the Berlin wall came down, I came out of the closet, and I started to put together my identity as an adult.

After I came home I went to university. What a wonderful time! I was an English creative writing major for four years, spending my summers at my mom’s house in Europe, drinking like a fish, and having a very good time. As I got close to graduation I took a pottery class. As soon as I touched clay everything else in my life took a backseat to my sculpture. I spent the next few years learning all the LSU art department had to teach me, working at a coffee shop, and reading every book on art I could find. During this time I met my love, Darin. My BFA show at LSU was a sculptural exploration of childhood memories. In the fall of 1998 I started Graduate school at UMass Dartmouth, in New Bedford, Massachusetts. I left after one semester and ended up at Tulane University in the fall of 1999, where I finished my Masters in 2001. My MFA show was another sculptural exploration, but this time I was thinking of the nature of memories and our ever changing relationship to our own memories.

I returned to Baton Rouge after Graduate school and started a little ceramics program at the Baton Rouge Community College and taught at Baton Rouge High School. Over the next few years I taught in Ireland one summer, at art camps, and in the Landscape Architecture department at LSU. I also managed to hold three solo exhibitions of my sculpture. New Orleans remained a temptation the whole time and, in June of 2004, Darin and I bought a house in the Bywater neighborhood of New Orleans. I accepted a job with the Arts Council of New Orleans running the ceramic studios in their soon to open art complex. Their soon to open art complex never opened and after the worst 13 months of my life, I quit. One week later Hurricane Katrina destroyed New Orleans. We evacuated to Baton Rouge and spent the next five weeks at my friend Susan’s house. On October 7, 2005 we moved back into our house. A lot of the Bywater made it thru the storm and we were very lucky. I lost my sculpture studio, but moved into a small space in Studio Inferno and had a solo show of my work in February, 2006 at Barrister’s gallery. These days I am working at an art gallery, making art, working in my garden, and trying to figure a way to make a living here in the city of the damned. I still listen to The Smiths.