vivonne thwaites
curator
bridget currie
things for capture, things for flight 2009-2011
wood, porcelain, plaster, brass
things for capture, things for flight 2009-2011
wood, porcelain, plaster, brass
Bridget Currie (b 1979) is a South Australian artist working predominantly in sculpture. She was one of the founders of Artist-run-initative Downtown Art space and has been involved with independent art practice as an artist, writer, speaker and curator. In recent years her work has been exhibited widely at Artspace, PICA, AEAF, CACSA, 24 HR Art and many regional and artist run spaces throughout Australia. In 2007 she undertook a residency at the Centre for Contemporary Art Kitakyushu, Japan, returning to Adelaide in 2008 fascinated by the structural processes of Japanese gardening and the elemental forces of Tsukemono (pickle making). Since that time she has continued to make work about forces of weight, support and pressure affecting the everyday processes of the world. Bridget is a 2011 Samstag Scholar.
Like small studies, or miniatures these works puzzle out ideas relating to gravity, balance, poise and weight.
A gentle visual hum
delicate glimmer barely detectable over tidal eyeball pressures
Tiny phosphorescent bugs swarming at night
Pulsing, faint swirling orbits around whitely swimming arms.
Soft hairs float on warm currents
Huge amounts can I carry in my arms
Each thing poised between earth and sky/floor and ceiling
one way to flight the other to falling
And this was the way I could hold onto myself, bobbing on the end of a string. And weigh myself to earth, keeping alongside each sole placed down an anchor.
bridget currie - cv
| SOLO EXHIBITIONS | |
| 2009 | ‘Regulators’ Experimental Art Foundation, Adelaide, SA. |
| ‘Heavy shit: two forms’ special project for CACSA grounds, Adelaide, SA | |
| 2007 | ‘Years Without Magic’ Two person exhibition with Louise Haselton, SASA gallery, Adelaide SA |
| 2006 | ‘Feast Days’. Exhibition in part fulfilment for the degree of Master of Visual arts, Liverpool street gallery, University of South Australia, Adelaide, SA |
| ‘Bigger’ Slide Space, 200 Gertrude st. Melbourne, VIC. | |
| 2005 | ‘Spiritual Militancy’. Downtown Art Space, Adelaide, SA. |
| 2003 | ‘Scivias’,. Experimental Art Foundation, Adelaide, SA |
| 2002 | ‘Things Against the Sky’, Contemporary Art Centre of SA, project space. |
| SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS | |
| 2010 | The New New, CACSA, The Gallerie, North Terrace, Adelaide |
| 2010 | Bridet Currie's most recent project was a collaboration with her sister Alison, a dance artist. Three Ways to Hold was performed at SASA gallery at various intervals, 11 Agust to 3 September. Performances FOLD, LIFT, PROP, COLLECT explored fundamental concepts of weight, space and gravity. |
| 2009 | ‘Road Movies’ Contemporary Art Centre of SA, Adelaide, SA. |
| 2008 | ‘Portable Ends’ CCA Open Studios Centre for Contemporary Art Kitakyushu, Japan. |
| 2007 | CCA Maeda Exhibition, Kitakyushu, Japan. |
| ‘Publicity’. Curated by Reuben Keehan, Artspace, Sydney, NSW. Touring to the Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia. | |
| ‘Bloodlines: Contemporary Art and the Horse’ Curated by Peter Fay, Touring Regional NSW and QLD Until 2009. | |
| ‘AS IT IS - AS IT CAN BE’ Curated by Downtown Art Space, at Bus Gallery, Melbourne VIC. | |
| ‘Workshop:Nonstop’ Curated by Lisa Kelly, Loose Projects, Sydney.NSW | |
| 2006 | ‘Things will be Great’ Curated by Peter McKay, Mark Siebert, Anne Weckert. MOP projects Sydney, NSW. |
| 2005 | ‘Mentor Mentored’ Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia, Adelaide,SA. |
| ‘Transported’, Curated by Greg Fullerton Blindside ARI, Melbourne, VIC. | |
| ‘Drawn Out Curated by Hannah Matthews at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, WA. | |
| ‘Art Year Zero’ Curated by Andrew Best SASA Gallery, Adelaide, SA. | |
| 2004 | ‘Crimes Against Wisdom’ Two person exhibition with Andrew Best 24 HR Art, Darwin, NT. |
| EDUCATION HISTORY | |
| 2004- 2006 | Masters of Visual Art by Research. |
| South Australian School of Art, University of South Australia | |
| 1997-2001 | Bachelor of Visual Arts (Honours, First Class) |
| South Australian School of Art, University of South Australia | |
| SELECTED PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT | |
| 2009 | Included in Aleksandra Mir’s ‘How Not to Cookbook’, Collective Gallery Edinburgh |
| 2008 | Guest speaker in the Experimental Art Foundation Talks Program. |
| 2007-08 | Participant in the CCA Kitakyushu Research Program, Japan, |
| Artist in Residence at Artspace residential studios, Sydney to create a temporary public art work for the exhibition ‘Publicity’. | |
| 2006-07 | Research Assistant, Visual Arts and Design Research Group, University of South Australia, research and project assistant on various public art projects. |
| 2006 | Curator of ‘Taking the Cure’, Downtown Art Space, Adelaide, around the broad idea of drugs. Artists: Michelle Nikou, Marcin Koblyecki, Gerry Wedd, Mathew Bradley, Sarah CrowEST, Bianca Barling, Akira Tamura, Andrew Best. |
| Convenor of the Artist-Run-Initiative Panel, Artists’ Week, 2006 Adelaide Festival of Arts. | |
| 2002-2006 | Founding member and Co-Director of Downtown Artist Run Space,Adelaide. |
| 2004 | Organiser and Convenor of curious thing, a national cross-disciplinary colloquium for Post-graduate researchers in the creative arts. SASA, University of South Australia. |
| Curator of ‘Manifesto’ at Downtown Art Space, Adelaide a large group exhibition around the concept of the artist’s manifesto | |
| RECENT GRANTS AND PRIZES AWARDED | |
| 2011 | Anne & Gordon Samstag International Visual Arts Scholarship view |
| 2008 | Arts SA Project Grant |
| 2007 | Arts SA professional development grant to participate in the CCA Kitakyushu Research Program. |
| Freedman Foundation Traveling Scholarship participate in the CCA Kitakyushu | |
| Ian Potter Cultural Trust funding to participate in the CCA Kitakyushu | |
| 2006 | Arts SA project assistance grant to produce new work for the exhibition |
| 2004-2006 | Australian Post Graduate Award, for Masters of Visual Art Research candidacy. |
| SELECTED CATALOGUES AND BOOKS | |
| Hoskin, T. and Currie,B. ‘Regulators’ Catalogue. 2009 Experimental Art Foundation. | |
| Avikainen, A. Currie, B. Hamano, T. Henderson,T. Palm, C. Petersen, K. Taxiarcopoulos,Y. ‘CCA Research Program 2008’ CCA Kitakyushu, 2008. | |
| Keehan, Reuben. ‘Publicity’ catalogue Artspace/CACSA 2007. | |
| Kelly, Lisa & McKay,Peter. ‘Years Without magic’ catalogue, SASA Gallery, University of South Australia. 2007 | |
| Ed. Fay, P ‘Bloodlines’ catalogue, Hawkesbury Regional Gallery, NSW. 2007. | |
| Matthews, Hannah. ‘ Drawn Out’. Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, 2005. | |
SELECTED QUOTES
Teri Hoskin, Press release for ‘Regulators’ Experimental Art Foundation 2009
Every little thing needs a bit of help to get by. Plant matter has formed part of the artist’s material repertoire for sometime. In Regulators the Japanese practice of altering the structures of plants – either by crutches or selective pruning – has incited a set of thoughts around the way the dead hold up the living. The EAF installation is a large-scale extension of ideas developed by the artist during a 2007/08 residency at the CCA Kitakyushu. Portable ends (things under pressure) is the title she gave the work made and exhibited during that time. The artist’s fascination with Japanese methods of pickling food (tsukemono) led her to think about the weight of tradition, preservation (states of decay and aliveness), and time. Her take on time was to invert the architectural foundations of the everyday so that the familiar planes that make the structures we perform on and in became rooted, even founded, in the age old tradition of preservation of food with salt and ritual. The ancientness of human practices for living and socialising – here the processes that preserve the bounty of the harvest for barren periods – are signalled in all their guises from the traditional pickle-making ceramic jars to vessels fashioned from throwaway packaging.
Reuben Keehan, ‘Publicity’ catalogue. Artspace/CACSA 2007
‘It is the dissimilarity of the aesthetic gesture from the standard proceedings of everyday life that is the active function of these practices, the uncanniness of a certain formal rigour or a performing body treated as device to momentarily disrupt the flow of information and allow—or at least invite—the appearance of counter-narratives: an ecological consciousness obscured by rush-hour frenzy and commuter ennui; hidden stories woven through the complex fabric of urban life, or an absurd cosmology aimed at instructing anyone who wants to listen on how art can make them see the world differently. Or the everyday itself is framed as the aesthetic project, reflexively training critical attention back on the conventions of the artworld itself…
Bridget Currie’s Heavy Horse meanwhile, a monument to failure and compromise—her attempts to organise a flag-bearer on horseback ride past Artspace’s front entrance repeatedly thwarted in the over-legislated, overly litigious of context of harbourside Woolloomooloo…’
Lisa Kelly, ‘Years Without Magic’ catalogue, SASA gallery, University of South Australia, 2007.
Working steadily towards Years Without Magic, Bridget has been amassing items of heavy men’s clothing – coats, jackets parkas in a work-wear palette of blues, greys and brown – in a volume that some visitors to her studio have found a little intimidating. Perhaps for the empty threat of two hundred or so bulky blokes – workmen, tradies, labourers- having just been and gone, or soon to return. Into the linings and pockets of jackets and onto socks she’s sewing five cent pieces like sequin. Coinage sticks in her mind for the banal convenience that the small, stamped circles of precious metal we carry everywhere have acquired in a finely tuned scheme of monetary value and exchange. A construct in which the five cent piece hovers vulnerably at the line between worth and worthlessness, the lowest denomination that many would now sooner walk past than trouble to bend down and pick up. Consistent with a strategy of querying the placement and proportion of value, this smallest of coins is recouped as unlikely protector or talisman, stitched and hidden into the folds of common garments.
John Barbour, ‘Bridget Currie+Louise Haselton: Scivias+Small Crowd’ broadsheet Vol 32, No. 3 2003
‘So, where Currie is all aether and lyric innocence conveyed through the bare essentials of bunting, a folded curtain and a flickering video vignette of friends picnicking on the grass… diaphanous and hermetic, delicate and inward looking, a paradoxical invocation of prolixity through absence. Currie’s works appear to speak no matter how obliquely, of the fragility of intimate human relations… and perhaps, beyond all this… the need to show and feel care in a rough world.’