Thom Bridge was invited to attend the BPB Portfolio Reviews with his bodies of work Fält and Elite.
Over the past couple of years, I have exhibited a variety of photographic works in solo and group presentations, ranging from straight-forward prints to sculptural works and installations. Previously exhibited as connected constellations or in tandem with other works, this showcase brings together four interlinked photographic works that each address the materiality and specificity of photographic printmaking and papers.
From the material systems exploited by the simultaneously positive/negative and digital/analogue manifestations of Elite the manipulated packaging of a 1980s photographic consumable, to the playful systematic tessellation of photographic materials cut to standard paper sizes used in photography in Fält, to the sequential layered, light-damaged colourations of Superpositions; each of these distinct works offer mediations upon the numerous inherent and inherited systems within photomedia.
In the fourth and final work (After a while, light always revenges itself for having been taken prisoner — it gathers itself back) vernacular images of the moon’s terminator, the line between light and dark, sunrise and sunset, are photocopied onto chemically unfixed black and white photographic paper which changes colour as it reacts to light during the course of an exhibition.
Born 1987 in Reading, UK, Thom Bridge is a half British, half Swedish photographer and artist working in London. Educated in both Britain and Sweden, at the University for the Creative Arts at Farnham and Valand Academy respectively, Bridge is currently a sessional lecturer in Photography at Canterbury Christ Church University. Bridge’s practice is characterized by his continued investigation into the dualities found between photographic language, his mother tongue (English) and his recently learned mother’s tongue (Swedish). It is within these dualities that his practice operates—never one or the other, English or Swedish, analogue or digital, one twin or the other, but in fact always both.
Click here for more of Thom’s work.
