About us!
The Brush Company is the collaborative art practice of husband-and-wife duo Kedrick McKenzie and Raegan Galleher. During the early days of the COVID-19 lockdown, in that brief window of time where people were making sourdough bread and cheering for frontline workers, we combined Kedrick’s ceramic work and Raegan’s fiber experience and experimented with making handmade ceramic brooms. From that starting point, The Brush Company developed toward our goal of making objects that contain a small strain of that utopian spirit we felt in those dark days when strangers felt a little more willing to help each other out. Our work balances on a seesaw between functionality and whimsy with a dedication to craft as the fulcrum.
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The Brush Company emerged from other makers sharing their processes and giving the opportunity to other craftspeople to remix and reuse their work. Kedrick has spent years working in community art spaces, and both have benefited immensely from working and learning from other artists. The objects we create aim to be a celebration of the shared desire to make cherished and special objects that run through so many of us.
Our work is engaged in a dialogue with contemporary ceramics that is important and of the moment. Industrial ceramics have had an enormous impact on the aesthetics of American homes and have been an often unaddressed force on the studio art movement in the US. Engaging with historical references such as Fiesta Tableware, Russell Wright, and contemporary makers like Klein Reid, Felt+Fat, and Jonathan Adler, our functional and non-functional objects alternate between being purposefully crafted for use and being intentionally rendered “useless.” That play with functionality intentionally calls to question the streamlined minimalism in Modernist design. We find the tension between our desire for well-crafted individualized objects and our love of well-designed mass-produced functional ware fertile soil.
More about Kedrick’s Work
Kedrick McKenzie’s work is an inquiry of what lies underneath layers and layers of frontiers.
Growing up on the West Coast where, as Joan Didion puts it, “boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension,” his work originates from the act of questioning his assumptions how a frontier is claimed and the stories that are told about it. How are the stories of colonization told? How do objects and images alter the historical record? How do the things we fill out homes with change our views of the past?
By engaging with visual culture and mythmaking Kedrick combines quotidian craft practices, historical research, and ephemeral materials to challenge the slippery and subjective ways that histories are recorded.
His practice revolves around the uneasy combination of the care and individuality imbedded in craft traditions with the extractive practices and consumer culture found in large scale industries. The objects we surround ourselves with, the food we ingest, and the narratives that surround those forces are constant themes in his work. The result is a research led practice that suggests new stories about place, identity, and history.
More about Raegan’s Work
Raegan’s art practice is intentionally iterative and haptic.
With a focus on texture, vibrancy, and materiality, she is especially drawn to work that requires balancing tension within a created grid. Uncovering a supportive structure allows her to collaborate with the material and celebrate the richness of the finished piece. Her engagement with the grid provides a catalyst to tap into human emotion, thought, patterns, and history. The structure of the matrix allows intuition to take over, revealing a collective unconscious, passed down from generations of making. Her practice explores the relationships between structure, repetition, and play, reflecting her ongoing interest in craft as a means of observation, connection, and meaning-making.
You can find us at our studio most weekends with our amazing dog, Cheese!