Sarah Bridgland

Sarah Bridgland’s diminutive paper creations inhabit the territory between sculpture and collage. Delicately fashioned out of second-hand ephemera collected from junk shops and fragments of Bridgland’s own printed media, they create spaces where the real and the imagined co-exist, where fact and fiction collide. Each piece is a myriad of textures, shapes and lettering, reflecting Bridgland’s interest in the formal concerns of the Russian avant-garde and Constructivism.

Bridgland is fascinated by the marriage of forms and her work celebrates this. Playful in approach, it explores the endless permutations of the cut out as a miniature type of reality. Recalling the mobile paper engineering of children’s pop-up books and toy theatres it exploits the cut-out’s potential to create a narrative, make-believe world, where Bridgland employs each piece as if it were an actor or a prop in a play. Rather than writing a story, though, Bridgland is interested in the way chance narratives are invoked through the arrangement of the cut-up material. Adopting a formal language, Bridgland organizes space by balancing the effects of different typefaces and graphics, textures and colours, to create a kind of three-dimensional drawing in which snippets of imagery and information invite the viewer to make their own associations, imaginary conversations between the juxtaposed forms.

Exploring the intimate link between object and memory, there is a simultaneous sense of both loss and preservation in Bridgland’s work. A desire to hold on to the past contends with a process that necessarily destroys it. Using forms and materials that are explicitly nostalgic, each element becomes part of a constructed history as time is re-arranged and the viewer is invited to re-experience the past in an entirely new way – half real, half imagined. The intimate scale of the work encourages daydream and reverie, heightened by wonder at its meticulous craftsmanship. Bridgland plays upon our desire to dream, creating miniature worlds made all the more enchanting by the comforting ordinariness of the their constituent parts before they spring collectively to life.

Born in 1982, Cambridge, UK

Education
2004-2006: MA Printmaking, Royal College of Art, London
2001-2004: BA [Hons] Fine Art Printmaking (First Class), University of Brighton
2000-2001: Foundation Studies in Art and Design, Cambridge Regional College

Solo Exhibitions
2009: ‘In Place – New Collage Works’, Man&Eve, London

Selected Group Exhibitions
2008: ‘Summer’, Knoedler Project Space, New York — ‘NEXT art fair’, Chicago — ‘Black Light’, The Street Gallery, University College Hospital, London — ’10: The Chris Orr Years 1998-2008’, Royal College of Art, London — ‘Material Worlds’, St.Bart’s Gallery, London
2007: ‘Paper-thin worlds’, Man&Eve, London — ‘Red Hook Art Show’, Brooklyn, New York — ‘Obsession Durch Technik’, artMbassy, Berlin — ‘ARTfutures’, The Contemporary Art Society, Bloomberg Space, London — ‘System Error: War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning’, Palazzo delle Papesse, Centro Arte Contemporanea, Siena — ‘Sea Change’, Mark Jason Gallery, London — ‘Air Guitar and Two Teaspoons’, Bischoff/Weiss Gallery, London — ‘Hot Off The Press’, Curwen & New Academy Gallery, London — ‘Year_07 Art Projects’, London — ‘Aqua Wynwood art fair’, Miami, USA
2006: ‘Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2006, The Coach Shed, Liverpool (as part of the Biennial), Club Row, Rochelle School, London — ‘SNAP’, The Street Gallery, University College Hospital, London — ‘Cut And Paste’, The Old Sweet Shop, London — ‘No Man Is An Island’, The Empire, Bethnal Green, London — ‘Starting A Collection’, Art First, Cork St, London — ‘The Show’, Royal College of Art, London
‘Paperworks’, Paper Art Now, Bury Art Gallery, Manchester — ‘Let’s Riot, Café Gallery, Southwark Park, London
2005: ‘RCA Secret’, Royal College of Art, London — ‘Interim Show’, Royal College of Art, London — ‘L’Exposition, Cité Internationale’ Des Arts, Paris
2004: ‘Final Degree Show’, University of Brighton

Prizes/Awards
2006: The Printmakers Council Award, The Show, Royal College of Art, London — Short-listed for The Conran Prize, The Show, Royal College of Art, London

Residences
2005: Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris

Publications
2009, New York Arts Magazine (Summer) — ‘Collage: Assembling Contemporary Art’, Blackdog Publishing, 2008 — March 2007, an Magazine — November 2006, Agenda, Wallpaper Magazine (review of New Contemporaries) — November 2006, Art Monthly (review of New Contemporaries) — September 2006, Art Review — September 2006, an Magazine — May 2006, Diversion, Limited Edition Box Set, Royal College of Art, London

Collections
The West Collection, Sir Terence Conran private collection — Private Collections, UK and USA