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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.
Claire Bridge’s sculptural work we are multitudes was commissioned for Melbourne Now 2023 and included in Vessels, co-curated NGV and Craft Victoria at the National Gallery of Victoria, NGV Australia. Bridge and Destefano’s major collaborative exhibition What I Wish I’d Told You, 2022, toured Victoria, Australia to critical acclaim. Her work Silence/Violence was curated into Erasure by Nur Shkembi at CoVA , University of Melbourne, and Recalibrate showing in Manic, The Big Anxiety Festival at the University of New South Wales 2019. Bridge has been the recipient of numerous grants and commissions including the FCAC/WestSpace Commission 2022, awarded The Australia Council of the Arts and Creative Victoria grants, and a recipient of the esteemed Bundanon Residency.
Claire Bridge is winner of the Living Art Award and People’s Choice for the Stan and Maureen Duke, Gold Coast Art Prize 2009, and has been awarded the Black Swan Prize (Silver Medal), People’s Choice in the Portia Geach National Portrait Award and Shirley Hannan Portrait Awards. She has been short-listed on multiple occasions in the world’s richest portrait prize, the $150,000 Doug Moran National Portrait Prize and a finalist in the prestigious Sulman Prize at the AGNSW. Bridge was founder of Art World Women, a former advisor to the Dame Joan Sutherland Fund, and founding board member of Sandbox Studios and Gallery.
Bridge’s work is held in public and private collections including Maroondah Federation Estate Gallery, the Honorary Consulate of Monaco and collections across Australia and New Zealand, USA, UK and Europe, and the Peregrine Collection, The Moon.