Eric Bridgeman NO DIRECTION

Eric Bridgeman, Interview with Rose Parish 2012

You’ve been in Liverpool for nearly three months now, how has the landscape effected and composed your work and practice?

When beginning a project in a new unfamiliar place, it feels like you’re starting at zero, a blank page, and back to square one. Even if you managed to write a convincing proposal for how you were going to spend your time there, you enter a new zone and space. It takes time to find yourself. Its migration and adaptation I guess. This can be a choice though, people can travel and travel and put on shows all over the world from place to place and deal with it. But I choose to infiltrate the place before I make any decisions. Having 3 months to produce something is good time for that. When I arrived here in Liverpool, I felt I had arrived to that place I had always imagined existing, or seen before, but it was real. I love looking at the cobble-stone roads, the old buildings, the industrial landscape contrasting with the historical statues and churches.

I think I spent the first month just looking at things and people. Trying to figure out where I am and why. I find that's usually the first step. Landscape to me is not just the buildings or people, but the context or reality I understand is playing out where I am. My favourite things to look at while here have been sea gulls, roads, guys in track suits and hoodies, girls with rollers in their hair, artistic types who try too hard, drunk people in suits, packaged meat slices, shopkeepers who keep an eye on me in their shops, and I could go on. My biggest interest has always been people.

In Liverpool, if I am to be broad on the term landscape, what has affected me most is the way in which class and status are played out or performed so explicitly here. Particularly in young men, it appears the divide has been cut straight down the middle. Besides being aware of history and class structures, I found that this is what I was interested in most, and wanted to look at it in simple ways of design and performance in youth culture. I didn’t really plan to make-work from this. Though I fought with my thoughts all the time about what to make of it, and even if I wanted to make anything of it at all. I really just wanted to get to know people rather than look at them. But as I am a visual person, it came back to looking at the surface of people and how they behaved and designed themselves. That has been my way for quite some time now. Probably an instant mechanism for when i'm in a new place. Or maybe i'm just a judgemental wanker.

The divide in the groups of young guys (and men in general) reminded me a lot of how life is in Papua New Guinea, and to some extent in Australia, and to the world's various class structures. It was nothing new, but people here were doing it in a different fashion. I became instantly attracted to the sight of guys wearing Adidas tracksuits. Sometimes just a hoodie, sometimes a full matching kit. Scally as people call them. Though I stopped using that word as it reminded me of when people use to call people Niggers and Fags. Depending on where I would venture around, I would sometimes see a group on guys in Adidas or tracksuits standing in a pack, and close by there were a group of young lads looking like the boy band One Direction, or boys that stink of new clean clothes, hair product and cologne. This is how I saw the divide and the landscape playing out.

And me, as my normal behaviour goes, looks in from the outside not knowing which team to support. I already knew there was tension between classes in the UK, and it had caused events like the riots. But for me the sort of tension I saw in the way people chose to design and present themselves in everyday settings was more interesting. I see self-design as a statement. Violent, passive, whatever. And I see people clinging to it because it reminds you of who you are and where you think you belong. I went through many phases of trying to put these ideas into my practice. But eventually realised it was about tension. And my work is always about tension, in various guises. So it didn’t really matter too much how I did it, just as long as I illustrated it in some way.

I knew quite early on in my stay at The Royal Standard that I wanted to use the car park outside for a video work, photographs, or something. I spent lots of time outside, looking at the landscape, the composition and forms of the buildings, the seagulls and the industrial scrap that was spread around the area. I've always been attracted to mess and stuff. I felt a strong connection to the area outside the studio. It’s a pretty common site in Liverpool, which is also what attracted me to it. It would in the end help place the work and where the ideas for the work were born. The landscape spoke to me in a lot of ways. A lot of the materials in the No Direction work, like the palettes and garbage bags, were used because they were in my sight every day; I spent time with the material and developed a type of attraction to them. I rely on those types of impulses. I rarely go looking for things because i've calculated and planned for what I need to make a work. The stuff finds me, and its usually the stuff thats been sitting in front of me, depending where I am or what type of environment I am in. I’m a bit of a gatherer. In the end, I try to put all the pieces or ingredients together.

You’re coming back for the Liverpool biennial, why?

I have planned a show at a new space in town called FF97 Gallery, on Dale Street in Liverpool. It will be promoted with the Independents Biennial that runs alongside the Liverpool/UK Biennial. My show will only be up for one week, as I need to get back to Australia late September.

I didn’t plan to have a show until a few weeks ago, when I met a guy called Reggie who runs the new space. It came from coincidence and a chance meeting at the Grapes. I like that it’s an unplanned, impromptu show, which I found the space and am doing it with or without any institutional support. Takes me back to my first shows in Australia when I was a newbie just wanting to be shown. I’ll be showing installation and video works made while here in Liverpool, as well as a selection of earlier video and photographic works. I’m also planning to resurrect my first character, ‘Boi Boi the Labourer’ for some performances during the exhibition dates.

Boi Boi the Labourer, series ‘The Sport and Fair Play of Aussie Rules, 2008/09,

90cm x 110cm, Digital Print on Photo Rag.

Your work seems to deal with spontaneity and some of it seems to be giving people tasks. You’re still travelling after Liverpool, how important do you think it is to travel in a globalised world as an artist? Is it a spontaneous journey or a task for you?

Yes it’s a task, one that I’ve set myself to better myself. So it is a journey too. I travel back to my village in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea every year where I have a house and land. I started going back frequently after art school and now its just something that I do. In the village I can try to let go of western ideas of art, the Australian scene, and remember that I have my own place that it can’t touch.

Since I left art school in Brisbane Queensland, I began making work around Sydney and Melbourne, having all sorts of different show. At the end of 2010 I knew that I wanted to see and experience the rest of the world, because I had that duty as an artist to have more weight. I didn’t want to be an Australian artist, and I still don’t. I want to be an International artist, and I want my work to be able to transport well across many cultures and places. That’s still a work in progress, but important to me because I want to learn and be able to contribute in new and different ways.

Most of my travels are spontaneous because I never know when I will have money coming in, and I’m a sloppy organiser when it comes to looking after myself. I will just go and figure it out when I get there.

Morning Bull ranch, Brocket, Alberta Canada 2011.

My house in Kujip, Western Highlands Province, Papua New Guinea.

Part of your performance work in your blog videos in the residency you did in Canada was reacting to the isolation there, do you think this has been the same in Liverpool or is this entirely separate from your No Direction performance?

I can’t say it’s entirely separate. The similarity is that I’ve been placed in a new environment, different people, and ideas. The beginning is the same, it’s a clean slate, and the result depends on the experiences, observations and people I meet. There’s potential for work to progress from anything, and I just sit and wait. The difference with Canada was that I was in the remote Rocky Mountains in Alberta Canada. The town was Blair more, a small one street town with one pub, lots of miners and pick up trucks. Ang Lee filmed Brokeback Mountain in and around the region.

I was placed for three months in the Gushul Studio in Blairmore, a big old house, half of it converted into a studio with big glass windows. It was expected that it might take me some time to settle in, but the hardest part was making friends and acquaintances in the town besides at the local pub. Which is normally a good place to find people, but in this case I was really an outcast. I was trying real hard to infiltrate the close knit group of young people, the bar chicks, the young miners and cowboys. But they were a hard bunch to crack. I got pissed and had a laugh with them, but that was the extent of our interactions.

Film Still, ‘Brokeback Mountain’ Director: Ang Lee

Blairmore, Alberta Canada

After a while of trying, I got tired of focussing my energy on wanting to meet people, so I retreated to my studio. I would head to the pub at night, hang around for a while, then follow the railway tracks to my place down the road and drink, YouTube and paint on my own. This became my routine for the length of the stay. The work I ended up producing reflects that. The video diary/blog I started to keep communication with the outside world kept me going. While in Blairmore I found out that I would be coming to Liverpool. I already knew that it would be a different gig. New place, new people, new things to see, but a huge difference was the studios. I remember realising in Canada that what I was missing there was the interaction and dialogue you get when placed in a shared, communal studio environment. With other people thinking and doing things around gives me stimulus, my thoughts are more rapid and I am more productive.