PRACTICE
Britt Ransom’s work explores human, animal, and environmental relationships through sculptures and installations created using digital fabrication processes. Using 3D scanning, 3D printing, laser cutting, and CNC Milling, her work questions our shared environment, climate change, and our relationships with other species. Translating data gathered from the environment, Ransom’s work travels through various levels of software mediation while often originating through the phones that we carrying our pockets. Regularly examining other species and landscapes in relation to ourselves, Ransom question humans’ analogous existence as the largest and most complex pest-network on the planet. Her work is systematic both in construction and in concept, often a direct reflection of observed microcosms found at our feet, in the web of a digital mesh, and born out of the braided entanglements between ourselves and the other species of plants and animals with whom we share our world.
Britt’s practice has recently shifted to include making work in response to the restoration and historical significance of the Tawawa Chimney Corner House (TCC), a national historic landmark for civil rights activism in Wilberforce, Ohio and former home of Ransom’s great-great grandparents.
BIO
Britt Ransom (b. Lima, Ohio 1987) is an artist and educator based between Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and New Orleans, Louisiana. Ransom is a recent member of the New Museum’s New Inc. Social Architecture cohort and a recent recipient of the Heinz Endowment Creative Development Award. Her work has been recognized and supported through the Hopper Prize, Formlabs User Impact Award, Joan Mitchell Center Residency, Los Angeles Clean Tech Incubator (LACI) Residency, Santa Monica Camera Obscura Residency, Workshop Residence-San Francisco, The Arctic Circle Residency, and the College Art Association Professional Development Award.
Ransom’s work has been shown recently at the New Museum’s New Inc DEMO 2024, Ohr-O’Keefe Museum of Art, Antenna, The Ogden Museum of Southern Art, Contemporary Art Center New Orleans, Pitzer College Art Galleries, Honor Fraser, Royale Projects, Torrance Art Museum, Schering Stiftung (Transmediale, Berlin), Missouri State University, Texas Women’s University, The University of Dallas, and the Chicago Artists Coalition.
Her writing has been published in the Leonardo Journal by MIT Press (2019), The 3D Additvist Cookbook (2016), and The Routledge Handbook on Biology in Art, Architecture, and Design, Routledge Press Essay (2016), and In and Out of View: Art and the Dynamics of Circulation, Suppression, and Censorship (2021).
Ransom is the great-granddaughter of civil rights activist Reverdy C. Ransom and currently serves on the Bishop Reverdy C. & Emma S. Ransom Foundation. She is also on the Board of Directors for Freedom to Grow, and has previously served on the Board of Directors for New Media Caucus.
In 2017, Ransom was the SIGGRAPH Studio Chair and in 2019, as the SIGGRAPH Art Gallery Chair, one of the largest annual computer graphics conferences in the United States. Additionally, she was supported by the U.S. Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs as a fellow through ZERO1’s fellowship teaching exchange in Pachuca, Mexico.
Britt is currently an Associate Professor of Art at Carnegie Mellon University where she is the area chair of Sculpture, Installation, and Site Work. She has held previous academic appointments at California State University Long Beach (Long Beach, CA) and Southern Methodist University (Dallas, TX).
Ransom received her MFA in Electronic Visualization / New Media from the University of Illinois at Chicago (2011) and her BFA in Art and Technology from The Ohio State University (2008).