Repair
Claire Bridge and Yuqing Chen
10
October 2019
10
October
2019
1
November 2019
Gallery 1
Claire Bridge and Yuqing Chen confront legacies of gendered violence and cultural oppression. Together they highlight language as sites of culturally speci c transmission of violence. Chen speaks from her Chinese Mandarin background and Bridge from her culturally Deaf / Auslan background with her body-associated, spatial use of visual language. Together, their works share a language of materials; both using fabric, embroidery, stitching and weaving and incorporating these in various ways with digital images, photography or found objects.Claire Bridge draws on the pivotal essay by Audre Lorde, The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action, to confront the nature of silence and silencing alone with its embodied experience through soft sculptural works.Yuqing Chen uses photography and stitched mark making, both viscerally imposed on the body and rupturing the surface of photographs, elucidating Confucian instructions on obedience and the role of women in the Chinese family.
Exhibition documented by Lucy Foster.
Claire Bridge and Yuqing Chen confront legacies of gendered violence and cultural oppression. Together they highlight language as sites of culturally speci c transmission of violence. Chen speaks from her Chinese Mandarin background and Bridge from her culturally Deaf / Auslan background with her body-associated, spatial use of visual language. Together, their works share a language of materials; both using fabric, embroidery, stitching and weaving and incorporating these in various ways with digital images, photography or found objects.Claire Bridge draws on the pivotal essay by Audre Lorde, The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action, to confront the nature of silence and silencing alone with its embodied experience through soft sculptural works.Yuqing Chen uses photography and stitched mark making, both viscerally imposed on the body and rupturing the surface of photographs, elucidating Confucian instructions on obedience and the role of women in the Chinese family.
Claire Bridge
Claire Bridge is an artist whose practice includes sculpture, video, sound, painting and installation. Her sculptural ceramic works fuse the mythic and grotesque. Voluptuous, blistered, and ruptured forms enmesh the monstrous, visceral, and psychological with exuberant colour and excess. Challenging notions of anthropocentric individualism, she incorporates personal biographies and cross-cultural mythologies of death, decay, ritual and regeneration into chimeric conglomerations of hybrid beings and hyphenated becomings.Bridge's work explores the body as material and polyphonic voice, and relational multiplicities entangled with culturally rooted ecosystems. Rupturing forms, Bridge queers notions of the human and more-than-human. A wound becomes a generative opening, a disruption of dominant narratives, where aberrations alter trajectories, porousness enables passage, and scarification entangles intimacies. Her work engages with story as vessels that contain, sustain, and transform collective beliefs, attitudes and culture. Informed by scientific and ecological concerns interwoven with traces of myth and her mixed Anglo-Indian-Australian heritage, Bridge's sculptures possess a strangeness and glamour which disturb, seduce and intrigue.
Yuqing Chen
My work seeks to explore self-reflection, the relationship between identity and body, through video, installation and photography. During this isolation period, I have had time to make observations of everyday life. I have started to look at myself and the objects around me more; a lot, lot more. I am really interested in the connection of the self (the internal world) to the outside world. Through my work, I ask the question: what is the nature of the self?