Brown’s current practice centers on photographic works that document ephemeral arrangements made from natural materials. Working in her urban garden in Ottawa and in forested sites in Eastern Quebec, she uses the garden as both subject and method, engaging questions of memory, time, and mortality through the cycles of growth and decline. Her work functions as a quiet memento mori, grounded not in symbolism but in direct observation.

Barbara Brown trained as a visual artist at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and completed graduate studies at what is now Manchester Metropolitan University in England and the School of Photographic Arts Ottawa. Her early work focused on large-scale sculptural installations for architectural spaces, drawing on techniques for enlarging textiles. She has realized public commissions for the City of Ottawa, the Province of Ontario in Thunder Bay, and Manchester Metropolitan University.

Brown has exhibited widely in Canada and internationally. Recent projects include Terroir: Belonging to place and LifeCycle Conversations, a collaborative exhibition with sculptor Cynthia O’Brien at the Karsh-Masson Gallery in Ottawa. She has completed residencies at Kingsbrae International Residency for the Arts in New Brunswick, where she began developing deconstructed floral imagery, and at Kala Chaupal in India, where she collaborated on Matka: A Portrait of Traditional Water Carriers.

Alongside her studio practice, Brown became a certified horticultural therapist in 2006 and developed a year-round therapeutic gardening program, working for many years in long-term care with the frail elderly. This sustained engagement with the garden as a lived, relational space has profoundly shaped her artistic approach.

Barbara Brown lives and works in Ottawa on the traditional and unceded territory of the Anishinaabe Algonquin Nation.