February 2006
Bridgette Ashton: 'I dream of europe’
at Russell-Cotes Art Gallery & Museum
‘Tourists make the places they visit and create the resources they consume. You cannot therefore logically over use tourism places or exhaust tourism resources’. (Prof.dr GJ Ashworth, I dream of europe catalogue introduction.)
Bridgette Ashton: I dream of europe which runs until the end of the month at Russell-Cotes Art Gallery & Museum, Bournemouth, continues the artist’s long-standing fascination with a nostalgia of holiday-making.
Working mostly on a small scale, Ashton combines assemblage, print, stitching and photography, creating objects, often flagrantly sentimental, which retain evidence of materiality and process.
In the tradition of the eighteenth century Grand Tourist Bridgette Ashton presents travel cases, invented souvenirs and a plethora of objects and photographs concerned with popular European tourist attractions. Some of these objects, however, have been created in order to subjugate the need for site seeing at all. These tourist accoutrements indulge both the professional holidaymaker and armchair traveller alike.
‘The Russell-Cotes family travelled at a time when only the very wealthy could afford to be tourists. Ours, conversely, is the era of cheap mass transit, when anyone (well, most westerners) can travel to any part of the world. The contrast, then, between the original Russell-Cotes collection and the objects represented here echoes that social change: exotic, high-value antique artefacts are juxtaposed with mass-produced contemporary kitsch. This thought, however, is destabilised when one reflects that, ultimately, Ashton’s work is not the thing it represents, but is in fact a product of the imagination and skilled labour of a highly trained artist.’ (Dr Stephen Riley, a-n magazine February 2006.)
Familiar european landmarks are celebrated through a series of photographs which show View Master® viewers at the vistas depicted in their collections of souvenir photographs. In addition a set of stereo images for the same apparatus has been created specially for the exhibition, giving a virtual gingerbread tour of popular european landmarks.
Bridgette Ashton has participated in shows across the UK including ‘Transformations’ at Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, ‘Insula Ovinium’ on the Isle of Sheppey and at Hogarth House, Chiswick and her work is currently touring with the Met Office's ‘Elemental Insight’ exhibition. She has also shown in a number of alternative spaces including last year at the eighteenth century grotto ‘Scott’s Grotto’ in Hertfordshire.