Jacqueline Bradley + Bridie Lunney
10/8/23 - 26/8/23
Essay
Room Sheet
The work here is a relationship without, outside, and beyond language. Objects exist as phrases; their arrangement as a grammar. The objects are echoes, reflections, light gestures - brief stabilisations of matter. After this show, the objects will melt back into their lived space. Only here, and now, do they hold their breath.
The chemistry between Jac and Bridie (which we intentionally won’t distinguish from their work) is self-evident. They flow and diffuse into one another. There is a radical kind of collaboration that goes beyond collaboration here. They are not ambitious for their individual selves here nor cheering each other on. Instead, mutual support emerges in the gap where the fear of bleeding into another’s practice once existed. As in any conversation their individual voices must be distinct, and yet the conversation cannot exist without either of them. They are distinct, but not separate. The objects are a conversation, thoughts expressed in making, not a reflection, documentation, or indexation of language.
When communicating and thinking become one we approach telepathy. For Ursula K. Le Guin, author of the Left Hand of Darkness, among others, this is an ability which remains latent in the human population. It must be discovered, or perhaps re-discovered, after ages of philosophical separation between our internal selves and the external world. It is perhaps Quiet Intensities which marks the beginning of this rediscovery.
- Harry De Vries