Perceptions and experiences of place inform Bridie Gillman’s paintings, abstracted to convey the felt rather than the seen. A childhood spent in Indonesia, and many subsequent cross-cultural residencies, has seen her capture the layers of travel in her practice. Watching Walls is a new and sumptuous body of work (paintings, ceramic sculpture, and a soundscape made in collaboration with her partner, musician Reuben Schafer) emerging from a residency in Portugal’s Arraiolos. The small inland town is best known for its historic buildings (often blue and white) and its rug-making traditions.
Gillman was living in an 18th century building, absorbing the layering of paint and frescoes on the walls, the light which changed with time of day, and the sounds and movements of people around the town. The backdrop of church bells, which chime every half hour, imbue the large canvases she produced here with a sense of punctuated time.
The installation titled Her mother’s room holds the soundscape. A single family owned this building over generations until fifteen years ago, with Maria Angelica the last of the family. Gillman, sleeping in Maria Angelica’s mother’s room, was surrounded with the original furniture.[1] Here the light and colour shifted the pink walls from red to gold; these moments are captured with a sense of disquiet. In her awareness of the histories in this room are those who have gone before, lingering.
Gillman’s rugs (created using a technique she learnt in Arraiolos and with wool produced there, and which viewers may sit on) rest on a plinth in the centre of the installation. Ranging around them, paintings titled Her mother’s room are immersive. In Her mother’s room (through the doors) (2023) clouds of translucent paint in muted colours (pink, gold, grey, blue) are anchored by rust red sections on either side. They recreate the layers of history carried by the walls with the flatness of thinner rust-coloured areas, pinned between the past and contemporary experience. For Gillman, ‘It is important that people know each work is about a specific observation, that the paintings are rooted in reality. Though of course, everyone brings their own experience.’
Other paintings, such as Touched, rubbed, worn. (2023) are gestural and open, with luminosity that holds an afterimage in the retina. Marks capture space in shades of pink and white, drawing together and then apart, a reminder of amorphous skies as the day lightens. Its surface engages, shape-shifting nuances that speak to the longevity of this environment. Gillman’s abstract ceramic sculptures are tactile, expressions of the ineffable in their surfaces, their sinuous shape, colour variations and treatment.
This exhibition sees Gillman using her painterly evocations to take us deep inside a past that is caught and ameliorated with the now. They make tangible her emotional responses in a way that engages our own.
Louise Martin-Chew, 2023
[1] Gillman said, ‘Maria Angelica was an artist, had no children and few resources, so the building fell into disrepair. The pink room I occupied was her mother’s room, and it looks almost exactly as it was found, same faded pink walls, furniture and broken chandelier. It is interesting to me that Maria Angelica didn’t sleep in this room (the best one in my opinion!). Rather she kept it as a type of memorial.’
Image: Her mother’s room (in the corners) 2023, oil on canvas, 137 x 203 cm
