Sweet Heart Email Thread
four paintings by Bridget Bailey
1
Peach tableau, miniature furniture affixed, atop which are paintings that depict faces, intimacy, a figure curled up with the word "SLUT" written on their body. Affixed to the tableau also are other paintings of faces and bodies. Tableau painted with clouds, flowers, looping gray lines. Colorful uninflated balloons, mostly in red and orange, at center and in the four corners. Other splashes of color, mostly in yellow, in flower and star shapes.
2
A red handprint in felt, atop a large monarch butterfly wing, atop a canvas divided into sloping thirds of pink, orange, and yellow.
The Moon
A chessboard-style design of black and white squares, with most of the center blank except for two words ("THE MOON") above four shapes representing four moon phases (full, first quarter, waxing crescent, a thinner waxing crescent), all shaped out of a pink clay-like material.
Leaves of Grass
The words, "LEAVES OF GRASS" spelled out using letters either resembling refrigerator magnets or made from a pale blue clay-like material, below a felt cutout of upside-down grass strung up with gray lines like a party banner, and above a warped image of pipes, obscured by three uninflated, upside-down balloons, in identical colors to those at the center of the first painting in this series of four.
About the Artwork
My paintings are plastic spaces for soft collisions of objects, identity, decoration, the wearable, the malleable, screen space, imagined and real space. I cultivate this through material exploration that investigates a place between representation and material as material. These materials include canvas, air-dry clay, wax, caulk, spackle, paint, paper, collage, found objects and images, felt, stickers, and a variety of acrylic mediums and glues.
My use of symbols and icons such as candles, balloons, streamers, clothes, and cakes speak to a habitual party or an any-aged-ness, in which ritual and perpetually evolving personhood plays out, hinting at the joy to be found in a queerness that has not yet fully arrived: I am interested in the intimacy of this world, the private self and the public self, and how those divisions can break down through dedication to play and material exploration in the space of a painting.