BRIDGET CURRIE'S OBJECTS
Unsymbolic 1
Bridget Currie calls her practice sculpture. The things she makes reveal a curiosity about how the forces of life and death act to make the world. In the last ten years she has been building a lexicon of forms, actions, and forces with de-natured materials and their qualities. It strikes me that Currie takes objects and things replete with symbolism (the tree, the bell, the hand) then makes them act in ways unsymbolic. Her work makes clear what is already here but not immediately apparent; not by using symbols—things that refer to other things—but rather by juxtaposing quite ordinary, even taken-for-granted, things in out of the ordinary ways. This strangeness of proximity and distance side-by-side makes a thought-image, a kind of unease in the body that says ‘yes and’—it is more than a mimetic representation of ideas or concepts, and more than Greenberg’s ‘law of the medium’ with its conversant privileging of opticality. There is something alive and other to semantic signification operating here that generates an ecology inclusive of the system of art and the wider world of things.
On the matter of plants
Made during a residency at the Centre for Contemporary Art, Kitakyushu, Japan Portable ends (things under pressure) featured pickled vegetables—preserved with salt and vinegar—as the ground matter or soil for a plywood plane that stretched from wall to wall in the gallery space. Each pickle-vessel was the receptacle for crude cement rods that applied downward force to the rotting-preserving vegetables, while acting as foundation rods for the plywood plane above. Gallery walls were bought into service as further tension was applied—at least visually—to the pressing process by strips of plywood curved from the walls... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline
Studio shot, Bridget Currie and toy bird, 2010. Photography Teri Hoskin.
Portable ends (things under pressure), 2008. Open Studio CCA, Centre for Contemporary Art, Kitakyushu, Japan. Photography the artist.
