Bridget Currie is fascinated by meadows. The artist describes the archetypal meadow, characterised by grasses, wildflowers, insects and crawlers, as “a very horizontal space that’s layered and interdependent.” In this humble environment, she explains, “everything has its own ecosystem or niche. It’s intertwined and entangled, and many, many, many organisms form the whole.” Currie contrasts the non-hierarchical space of the meadow to the art-historical idea of ‘figure and ground’, where the landscape is relegated to a backdrop for a human focal point, rather than existing in and of itself.
In her exhibition, delivered as the inaugural recipient of ACE Open’s Porter Street Commission, Currie immerses visitors in a slow and attentive space, redolent of the meadow’s intertwined ecology. Organic sculptural forms are held on specially-designed furniture, including a chaise longue that invites visitors to sit or recline. An intimate four-channel sound work, played on individual devices, consists of instructional texts whispered in soothing ASMR tones.
There are also, Currie says, “a lot of slugs”—a recurring motif in her work. “Such a defenceless being,” she explains. “Just that pure sensitivity: their whole body is a mucus membrane.” Here, slugs writhe through Currie’s new film soft insides, along with hands, sculptures and babies. “The human brain, when it’s an infant, is not differentiated into ‘my’ personhood and ‘your’ personhood and exterior environment and the self,” the artist explains. “It’s still pre-self.” These boundaries between self and other—heightened, diminished, overlapping—lie at the heart of what the artist is gently teasing out, through an immersive work that seeps through our own bodily edges.
Bridget Currie’s exhibition is part of the SALA Festival.
Message from the meadow
Bridget Currie
ACE Open
16 July—4 September
This article was originally published in the July/August 2021 print edition of Art Guide Australia.
Developed in 2022 by Artback NT as part of Apmere Mparntwe—the Australian Ceramics Triennale— touring exhibition Clay on Country, showing now at New England Regional Art Museum, showcases the diversity of ceramics in the Central Desert.
About Face is a smart piece of marketing. The new book on portrait painting from Australia and New Zealand has a mission to change buyers’ minds about the field. But as Jane O’Sullivan discovers, any sales pitch wears thin if it’s repeated often enough, and the close attention to how portrait painting is received by the market means that other important conversations fade to the background.
In Anmatyerr artist Elizabeth Mbitjana Pitijana’s first solo exhibition in Melbourne—which focuses on the Central Desert food source Arnwekety (bush plum)—the influence and love of her Country and culture is palpable. Elizabeth Mbitjana Pitijana is now showing at Niagara Galleries.
Even though women currently outnumber men in the arts by two-to-one, the industry remains rife with gender disparities from income to accommodating motherhood. So why, asks Neha Kale, is the growing visibility of female-identifying artists falling short of genuine, material change?
Now showing at Home of the Arts (HOTA), the sophomore Gold Coast Triennial, Here and Now, brings together 42 contemporary artists to represent the depth and dynamism of the city’s artistic community.
Trevor Vickers reflects on his six-decade career in hard-edged abstraction, the value that Perth’s light offers painters, and how his latest exhibition at Art Collective WA focuses on a series of quieter works.
