Bridget Gallagher {Artist}
Recent Work 2014
From the start, I knew that I wanted to incorporate my psychology research into my current body of work. Finding a starting place was difficult to do, however. My work included concepts of essentialism, children's attachment objects, duplicates, and object history, to name a few. The past few months, I spent my time testing out different ideas that related to my interest in psychology.
I began by exploring essentialism, which is the idea that natural kinds (i.e., plants, animals) contain an unseen "essence," that adults and children alike use to make category inferences. My first two pieces attempt to show the essence of the subject matter, in this case a cat. The painting on the right shows the more rendered form of a cat's eye, while the second is meant to be suggest the inner, unknown "essence" that makes a cat, a cat.
Moving away from essentialism, I investigated the idea of having "duplicate" paintings. This came from the study I worked on, in which we asked children to identify between their own original toy and a near exact duplicate. Most children were able to choose which toy was their own toy, based on subtle differences that they could pick up right away.
I took this idea of duplicates and translated it into pairs of abstract paintings, trying to find a balance between differences and similarities. The upper most pair to the left are similar to some extent, but have much more dramatic color differences.
The second set shows a lot more similarities than the first set I did. I pulled some inspiration from Judy Pfaff's work, who incorporates organic forms into her pieces. For my paintings, I began with the idea of rivers and the weeds and plant life that grow in them. In the painting furthest to the left I used a much heavier hand in applying the paint, as well as heavier, thicker tecture. I intentially tried to make this painting feel darker and heavier. The second painting to the right of the first, I used less paint and applied thinner layers. I tried to make subtle differences in these two paintings so that viewers can see that they are clearly related, but also different in some way.
After some struggling with essentialism and duplicates, I finally came to the idea of object history. Objects have often been considered extensions of the "self" and many people become attached to certain objects because of that object's association with a specific memory or person. This idea of object history led to the two paintings on the left. The folded paper swan, although basically worthless and made out of a scrap piece of notebook paper, is highly valuable to me, and I wanted to paint it in such a way that conveyed that. The painting next to it is based on a memory of a person that is connected to the paper swan, giving it its significance. I want to continue to explore objects and memories and how people relate to them. Much of my inspiration comes from the work done by Alyssa Monks and Andrew Wyeth, whose work is largely connected with their personal lives.