This summer, Tinworks continued its program of hosting artists on site to conduct research and develop new work. Wills Brewer hand-built ceramic vessels with forms based on earth-building techniques and traditional brick-making the artist learned in the U.S. and Europe. Often made of wild clay, the works were also inspired by Agnes Martin’s repetitive, meditative mark-making and her own forays into earthen construction at her home and studio in New Mexico. Brewer explored the possibility of constructing, firing, and inhabiting a large-scale clay dwelling on the Tinworks site.

This residency was part of Tinworks Art’s 2024 exhibition season, The Lay of the Land, which featured a major new ecological artwork by Agnes Denes and work by five artists inspired by the land of the American West.

With an intergenerational mix of established and emerging artists, iconic work, and newly commissioned installations, The Lay of the Land explored how land in the West is represented. The included artworks connected to land and place through their physical materiality—wheat, sediment, soot, clay, the sound of passing trains—and subject matter—the natural or industrial forces that have shaped the land of the West and depictions of western places shaped by memory or technology.

Wills Brewer is a fifth generation Oklahoman who divides his time between Texas and California. He currently works in research-based, collected materials to explore the social, ecological, geological and systematic histories of place—specifically, place over time. He has mainly worked in ceramics (earth) for the past decade. As a tribal member raised outside of the community, he has had to do his own research on his histories, being circumstantially tied to a geographic region and the tributaries that it comes from. Brewer's work focuses on the idea of “The West” and the seemingly endless constructs that generates.