24-7 Magazine - 'Folio Focus' by Lucy Griffiths
'If you’re feeling blue now the summer holiday season is over then Bridgette Ashton’s seaside kitsch and embroidered glitz could provide you with the perfect pick-me-up to see you through the winter months.
Bridgette, a Hertfordshire-born artist who’s now based in Cornwall, has a canny eye for eclectic finds. Her current work is a bright, imaginative and often nostalgic look at the contemporary grand tourist and her mixed media pieces offer a tactile insight into the art of travel and all its trappings. Working in digital print, collage, stitching and assemblage, Bridgette’s work tends to emphasise the use of recycled materials and found objects both natural and manufactured. For her current project, Bridgette has been looking at routes, destinations and travel paraphernalia and has collected a huge array of second hand sources from car boot sales and charity shops such as old tourist sightseeing guidebooks and out-of-date road maps to children’s atlases and embroidered postcards. The resulting work is a fun and engaging collection of pieces that epitomise the UK seaside holidays you remember from childhood, but also explore foreign travel and the familiarity of European city sights and landmarks. Pieces like ‘Bank Holiday Weekend’ and ‘Britain’ are almost souvenirs in themselves with their zip up embroidered cases containing trinkets that celebrate travel to a certain country and bright gaudy colours that make you reminisce about holidays and fun in the sun.
But some of the ideas behind the theme of travel came about just after September 11th, when people seemed to want to stay at home rather than go abroad and wanted the comfort of their personal possessions around them, Bridgette explained “Therefore, the idea of travel post 9/11 is almost more appealing than travelling itself,” Bridgette says. To expand on this theme she has also been working on some digital prints that include the views of famous landmarks as seen through a 70’s ViewMaster viewer – “as if the tourist is detached from the act of sightseeing, but still sightseeing nonetheless”.
But there are many other pieces, each as diverse and intricate, that explore this huge and varied theme – like the snooker table frieze with its map of ‘The Magnificent South West’ and the ‘Par Avion’ case that has miniature inserts which provide everything you’d need for air travel. On first impression Bridgette’s work is quirky yet aesthetically pleasing, but on closer inspection it reveals many layers and a painstaking attention to detail that can only come from closely observing contemporary society whilst paying reference to historical connections.
A trip to Bridgette’s studio gave a dazzling glimpse of what her proposed exhibition for the travel and tourism pieces will be like. She hopes at some point to exhibit the work inside a static caravan somewhere in the South West and allow people to step inside and view the exhibition at times, but also to peer through the caravan windows and get an outsider’s view of the traveller’s collection of holiday souvenirs and trinkets.
Currently, Bridgette is showing some of her earlier work as part of the ‘Elemental Insight’ exhibition, which celebrates the opening of the new Met Office building in Exeter. Her collection of work entitled ‘Forlorn Objects Reunited’ comprises a series of discarded handbags filled with jetsam gathered from Cornish beaches after winter storms, which are individually characterised and embellished.
Elemental Insight is now on at the Devon Guild of Craftsmen, at Bovey Tracey, until 7 November 04.'
