Bridget Currie | Message from the meadow

Message from the meadow is a new landmark solo exhibition by South Australian artist Bridget Currie. The outcome of ACE Open’s inaugural Porter Street Commission. Message from the meadow is an immersive, meditative exploration of how artworks can trigger sensory affect. Currie incorporates sculpture, furniture, film, and sound to explore the representation of abstract states of being, systems of thought and the vitality of life. Inspired by the way Modernist artists sought to represent spiritual states and religious ideas through abstraction, the central concern of Currie’s practice is bringing invisible things — beliefs, emotions and dreams — into the material world. The exhibition is alert to both the proximities and boundaries between bodies, objects and space. Organic, abstract forms made intuitively by the artist serve as physical koans (things that exist to ask a question), displayed amongst an ecology of bespoke domestic furniture that privileges intimacy and tactility. Currie has also constructed a sonic landscape of sound (ASMR) and spoken text (poetry, storytelling and new age guided meditation) to accompany the viewer and assist in short-circuiting the logical mind. Alongside this physical grammar of objects, Message from the meadow premieres Currie’s new film, soft insides — a non-linear documentation of pre-language encounters. Developed across 2020 under digitally fragmented and socially distanced conditions, Message from the meadow therapeutically encourages a deeper engagement with place and self.