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.
65,000 Years: A Short History of Australian Art is an extraordinary account of the unique art of this continent, published alongside a landmark exhibition at the Potter Museum of Art. Necessary and urgent, it tells the story of Indigenous Australian art; a new art history unlike anything we’ve seen. For Jane O’Sullivan, it’s a remarkable and must-read book.
In a new series of illustrated postcards available as a free gift with purchase only at the Art Guide Bookstore, Oslo Davis takes on classic and contemporary art terms and genres and reimagines what they could be referring to.
With so much to choose from, we’ve rounded up the major summer exhibitions in each capital city, open all summer long. Spanning Yayoi Kusama, Magritte, the Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, and many more.
In her latest exhibition at Plimsoll Gallery, Janine Combes uses her background as a jewellery maker to create a body of work inspired by abandoned towns once marked for settlement in Tasmania.
In an expansive show at the Chau Chak Wing Museum, seven leading Australian ceramic artists have reinvigorated one of Australia’s oldest museum collections by creating a contemporary potter’s quarter—known as the ‘kerameikos’ in Ancient Greece.
Heide Museum of Modern Art’s summer blockbuster exhibition is unveiling the breadth and beauty of Italian modernism through design. With over 170 objects spanning sixty years, Molto Bello explores the cultural impact of this period of creativity and invention.
