In her exhibition, ‘Independently Combining’, painter Celia Bridle expresses delicacy, intimacy, mobility and flow in her artwork.
In this exhibition, there are 24 drawings, a culmination of much detailed artwork using pen and ink. Her process also involves contemporary media in order to reduce the size of the drawings. Once completed, each hand-drawn image is scanned and printed at half its size, because this smallness further enhances its intense and detailed nature.
A memory from the past acted as an initial impetus for theses drawings. Celia remembers her experience of learning to write by hand when she was a young schoolgirl. Her teacher would trace letters of the alphabet in the air, explaining how to draw each individual shape.
An example of the influence of this early experience is ‘Vibrant Promise’, (2024), with its curving sweeping lines, which refer to the dynamic shape of the letter ‘S’, and generates a sense of momentum and vibrancy as lines unfurl across the space. The drawing, ‘Turn Under’, (2024), references the shape of the letter ‘O’, with hair-like lines spinning around a central circular space and crossing each other repeatedly. The lines are turning and sweeping, under and over each other. Coloured lines, turquoise and pink, mingle and weave with overlapping flourishes.
A sequence of new drawings followed when the artist’s connection to her early experience of alphabetical forms dropped away and, instead, she drew abstract images by hand, using pen and ink as before.
‘Inventive Impetus’, (2025), is a cluster of dynamic, sweeping lines forming diagonal. It is an exploration of intense and intimate spaces. ‘Layered Endeavour, (2025), is an example of the artist’s preoccupation with circular shapes, where most of the lines are laid down independently, gradually, and building, layer upon layer, a construction that is mobile, intense and detailed.
In her role as an artist for Note Printing Australia, a subsidiary of the Reserve Bank, and producer of polymer banknotes for Australia and internationally, Celia Bridle attended training in Switzerland. She was taught by a resident engraver in the skills of his profession and was shown how to interpret the engraving method in order to draw in the style of an engraver. The engraver worked under magnification, (using a microscope), cutting fine lines into a metal surface. Once completed his engraving was ready for printing on the surface of a banknote.
Celia Bridle’s artwork continues to be inspired by an assiduous approach to line and engraving’s measured configuration and intense immersion.
Image: ‘Independently Combining’, Celia Bridle, 2025, framed digital print on archival paper, 30 x 42 cm.
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