Brian Guerin

Low-Residency Master of Fine Arts Degree

Brian Guerin is an artist and archivist living in Philadelphia. Using clay, stone, and found materials, his works explore natural occurrence, touch, and perception of forms.

Guerin’s approach engages craft techniques to obscure evidence of human interference, instead employing them to mirror natural processes. In using porcelain and volcanic temperatures to create rocks, or carving stone to resemble softer, ephemeral bodies, Guerin blurs the line between the figurative and the geological.

Guerin holds a BA from Sarah Lawrence College (2017) and is currently an MFA candidate at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2026).

Dogie, Wood-fired stoneware

Way Through, Wood- and soda-fired stoneware

Bottle, Wood- and soda-fired porcelain

My work is centered on the geological: rocky porcelain, burnished sediment, carved stone.

Kaolin, the primary component in porcelain, arises organically over the course of millennia as a byproduct of decaying granite. In using porcelain and volcanic temperatures to create rocks, I am returning the material to a semblance of its prior form, thereby obscuring centuries of intervention and human relationship to the material.

This is a central paradox explored in my work: the use of my own gestures to conceal themselves. When I hand-build a form, its surface is adorned with fingerprints, suggesting softness; when I subsequently chisel these imprints away, the piece resembles unhewn stone. By enacting a paradox, I reveal something unnamable and true.

The objects I create possess a sense of material life and familiar presence. By inciting experiences of the uncanny, I draw new threads of remembrance: from prelingual pasts to the shapeless present.

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