Bridget Beck

ABOUT THE ARTIST

I create large-scale sculpture, drawings, and community collaborations. I am in direct contact with these materials whether it is metal or ink on paper. I get to know individuals more intimately while working on the collaborations. Throughout my art practice, I create a kind of cosmology where there is both drudgery and play. I work in several separate traditions bridging confines of fine art practices with kinesthetic gestures mindful of the working class. I playfully mix constructivism, surrealism, formalism, civic function and storytelling in creating connection the viewer or participant. The personal aspect of the work is of the utmost importance. My large-scale sculptures leave bravado behind and instead have lyrical hand cut elements that overtake the environment often leaving only a part of the larger relational aesthetic. I am interested in the inherent beauty of a junky world. I embrace used and labored bits and pieces that have a value that is overlooked.

My drawings act as a vehicle searching for possibilities unspeakable in terms of a constructed three-dimensional form. The drawings test the water for the new uses of materials to be created into sculpture. The cosmologies existing on the page provide a place for hardships to battle with the lighthearted and create sanctuary. The ink urges the sculptures on to new and interesting places. The drawings are also a place for personal release and fanciful stories, which break from the daily struggle of constructing the larger physical work.



The collaborative projects I undertake are now reaching beyond the community that I have grown up with. And so, I strive to understand and learn from new places before beginning the delicate process of sculpture collaboration. The relationships created in and around the physical form are often lacking when looking at the autonomous sculpture. “It is,” as Doug Atkin questions, “that perhaps the new form of narrative- narrative as a mutating organism, something that is living breathing and pulsing?” The collaborations are built to cause the eyeball to wonder… what is land, what is sky and what of this voyage is missing?