The head of the art department in my hometown told me that there was going to be a job available teaching ceramics and encouraged me to go to Penland to learn how to make pots. Young Elizabeth celebrates her birthday How did you end up at Penland? So I continued my studies to get an MFA in printmaking. When I majored in art in college, I thought teaching at the college level would be the ideal job for me. Instead of commercial paper dolls and coloring books, Mama got blank paper for us to draw on and cut up. Our mother encouraged our creativity, and we took private lessons in painting. We played with the scraps of fabric they had left over and made things from those. Yes! My mother and grandmother made frilly dresses for me and my sister. “Gothic,” inflated steel pillow by Elizabeth Brim INTERVIEW WITH ELIZABETH BRIM Did you always like to make things? In honor of the occasion, we asked her a few questions about her long relationship with Penland. We are proud to honor Elizabeth Brim as this year’s Penland School of Craft Outstanding Artist Educator. Her work has been exhibited at the Mint Museum in Charlotte, North Carolina, the North Carolina Museum of Art, The Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, and the Metal Museum in Memphis, Tennessee, which named her as their 2009 Master Metalsmith. She has demonstrated at numerous blacksmithing conferences, organized two symposia at Penland, and been a role model and inspiration for countless aspiring blacksmiths.Įlizabeth Brim is known throughout the craft world for her life-sized, steel replicas of traditionally feminine objects such as hats, dresses, pillows, and flowers for her expressive and fluid use of the material and for her facility at inflating steel forms with compressed air. Over three decades, she has taught many workshops at Penland and other craft schools including Peters Valley in New Jersey and Haystack in Maine. Although she started out working in ceramics, a Penland jewelry workshop in the 1980s sparked a lifelong interest in metals that quickly turned into a passion for working with hot steel.Įlizabeth was Penland’s iron studio coordinator from 1995–2000 and then settled permanently into a house and studio just a mile from the school. If anyone can be said to be one of “Penland’s own,” it would be blacksmith and sculptor Elizabeth Brim. Elizabeth Brim will be honored at this summer’s Penland Benefit Auction.
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