Creative Lives: Rosalind Faram & Bridget Harvey

Bridget Harvey -

Bridget utilises the act of making and conservation to ask critical questions, generating new understanding and meaning through craft, asking what we make, how we make it, and why that matters. She examines ideas like pace, repetition, playfulness and repair throughout her studio practice. I am particularly drawn to the nature of Bridgets work given the activism to conserve and repair, alongside the tactility of a lot of her work which seeing as she has a residency in the Victoria and Albert museum, will no doubt be accessible to the blind and visually impaired.

Using found objects and materials like fired ceramics, wood, and textiles, Bridget works interdisciplinary to make provocative collectable artefacts. Additionally Bridget orchestrates practice-based research, curates exhibitions, conducts workshops and talks along side writing.

' A great mend may not be done carefully, beautifully or traditionally but may bring something back into use spectacularly.'

I find this quote resonates with me given the nature of the subject matter I have delved into study and advocate for this year. Bridget ignores what society may deem beyond repair and works to conserve the item. All too often the blind and visually impaired have fallen victim to an unspoken autocracy within the industry, a constant assumption humms within the distant chatter of curators and gallery owners, declaring art to be strictly visual and nothing more. Knowing that another person sees quality in an object that may be mildly fragmented or impaired, instills a metaphorical analogy to my current practise.

Harvey is fascinated by the blurry areas in conjunction to professional and amateur, rendered well and ... not so well, significant and everyday. Bridget finds repair-making to be full of exciting actions, communities and politics, changing objects, mindsets and habits.

Being the Fashioned from Nature resident, Bridget will be looking at the garments and other fashion artefacts such as, shoes and bags in the V&A collections to understand how in the past we made, altered and repaired said garments. Bridget will then remake these ideas into contemporary textiles, creating open source instructions and tool kits for them. This will include unmaking contemporary garments and objects to understand them fully.

As an activist Bridget's practice has a strong political and environmental leaning to it. During her residency she will also look at protest-related textile artefacts such as Pussy Hats, banners and slogan tee-shirts in order to understand more about the relationship between textiles and protest, and how textiles are deliberately and incidentally used for resistance and political identity. Bridget materially explores narrative patinas – use, emotional engagement and need – and hand-work discarded domestic objects and materials into suggestive one-off or small-batch artefacts, using various making and conservation methods. Taking a broad and playful approach Bridget considers adorning herself with her works, protesting. Repair, once household practice, then chore outmoded by increased consumption, is now in a third wave. Upcycling and conserving is becoming seen as a political and environmental choice, and increasingly as innovative as a old garment or textile can be embellished aboard a new environment.

Alongside my passion for inclusivity, I am a fellow conservationist and find Bridget's work to be truly reputable in pioneering a new age of reinstating the "old" and "worn in"

Bullet pointed characteristics that I and Bridget share within our work:

Tactility
Conservation of materials (can be seen through my engraved plaster plate over in ART281 where I used the last of the plaster in a mixing bowl to carve so that it wouldn't go to waste)
Pattern
Sensory

Rosalind Faram -

Rosalind's work appealed to me given the seemingly surreal, juxtaposed, synchronic attitude she has toward the use of colour and its subject. Her dynamic paintings are informed by a widespread exploration into visual culture, that can include anything from Giotto to 1970's sweet wrappers and Muppets characters, to present day emojis, fashion culture and more. I was taken especially by Rosalind's use of colour and pattern, seemingly systematic in its approach. I find her collation of images, obscured and fragmented by collage to be both boisterous and retained. Some works depict this oxymoronic duo, especially 'Kneesox and Kniphofia.' The colours boisterous, vivid and proud, yet the stance of the subject stays restrained, shrouded by colours, emotive to sadness and loneliness.

Rosalind's work perils the norms of our suppressive society and challenges fetishised forms and displays of obsession and impulse with a spirited oeuvre of works that celebrate the farcical. Much like the contrast evoked from a chiaroscuro painting, the delectable and the distasteful unhinge the preternatural oddities proposed by a genuine contemporary artisan. Her practice is led by a passion for ways of enquiry into painterly representation, conjuring tableaux that seduce and repel in turns; deconstructing her subjects, playing with surface and creating spaces of uncertain dimensions. Seeing painting as a transition from an activity of mind into the bodily arena, she challenges the status quo with an acerbic wit and irreverent humour; delighting in meticulous detail and delicate layering which exists quietly in defiance amidst large, loud energy-led areas of rich colour and an almost primary simplicity of stuck-on fake jewels, metal foil, glitter and buttons - resulting in an exuberant and sophisticated power-play across the picture plane. Choosing to work in such a playful manner, reiterates the philosophical discussion Rosalind had conferred during our seminar. The ideologies proposed by the conscious and unconscious, spirituality and meditative states, her work establishes a metaphysical response to the preeminent transgression of life.

Bullet pointed characteristics that I and Rosalind share within our work: