Of flesh and flame

Performance, installation and art film launch, Wienholt projects in collaboration with bitforms gallery curated by Mieke Marple, Los Angeles, February 2024

In Of flesh and flame, British artist Millie Brown offers a searing meditation on collapse and renewal, an unflinching performance that harnesses the body as both medium and message. In an act of radical stillness and elemental confrontation, Brown sets herself ablaze: not in chaos, but in silence. The gesture is ritualistic, deliberate, and profound, fire as both destruction and illumination.

The flames engulfing her form evoke a visceral image of sacrifice and transfiguration. Brown’s body becomes a site of protest, mourning, and transformation, a living altar where the violence of a world in crisis is mirrored and transmuted. The performance channels the paradox at the heart of fire: its capacity to devastate, and its power to renew.

“It’s not just about burning,” Brown notes. “It’s about what must be revealed in the process, what must fall away for something new to emerge.”

Here, fire is not spectacle, but symbol. It speaks of systems in collapse and futures not yet born. Of flesh and flame does not offer resolution; it suspends the viewer in a charged in-between, where destruction becomes a necessary threshold for regeneration. The silence that accompanies the flames is deafening, a quiet that echoes with centuries of violence, and the hope of rebirth.

By surrendering her body to this elemental force, Brown stages a confrontation with the collective wound, both personal and planetary. The performance becomes a solemn invocation, a final breath for what is ending, and an offering for what might yet begin.

For that which is burned to the ground becomes the soil from which something new can grow.