Bridie Gillman (b.1990) graduated with a BFA Hons from the Queensland College of Art. Her recent luscious and expressive paintings are usually focused she says on ‘small moments of awe…a feeling of breathing in the sky…of the sky washing over me…’ While the paintings are not representative of a particular site they are, Gillman says, based on a response to a remembered experience of place. Feeling runs high in these works. They attempt to translate she says ‘an emotional sense of … place through abstraction, using layers of colour and considered brushstrokes’.
The paintings in Trace, Just before nightfall, they glowed and With my back against the rock, were both painted as a result of time spent in Bundjalung National Park. They are memory based works, trigged by sensations, observations of landscape features, competing or fleeting colours and overall feeling for place.
Her work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in Museum of Brisbane, Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre, Museum of Contemporary Art, University of Queensland Art Museum, Bundaberg Regional Art Gallery, RMIT Gallery Melbourne, The Walls Gold Coast, Blindside Melbourne, and Run Amok, George Town, Malaysia.
She is a past finalist of the Brett Whiteley Travelling Art Scholarship, 15 Artists, the MAMA National Photography Prize, and in 2019 was winner of the Moreton Bay Region Art Award. Gillman is co-director of STABLE, an artist-run initiative.
Gillman has undertaken Residencies in the following places:
Córtex Frontal, Arraiolos, Portugal 2023, Kedewatan Residency, Ubud, Indonesia 2019, Summer Studio Residency, Outer Space, Brisbane 2018, Carbon, George Town, Malaysia 2017, Residency with Rimbun Dahan at Hotel Penaga, George Town, Malaysia 2015, Residency with Ketjil Bergerak, Yogyakarta, Indonesia 2014.
