Sandra Bridie’s work straddles individual practice, collaboration, exhibition curation, teaching, gallery management, writing, and the interview as documentation of individual and collective artistic practice in Melbourne. Sandra has coordinated a series of spaces and projects including; Fictional and Actual Artists Space (1995-6), Talk Artists Initiative (1997-2000) six conjectural modules (2002-3). Sandra was also a founding member of the artist’s group Ocular Lab, which ran from 2003-2010 and through this involvement hosted a series of international, national and local artist’s residencies in the Ocular Lab space.
Bridie’s individual practice involves the invention of fictional artists, presented via a suite of art works from a range of media including film, sculpture, performance, painting and conceptual art. These works are usually accompanied by a published ‘interview’ with the fictional artist describing the journey towards the work seen.
Bridie has documented the processes and ideals of both the individual artist and artist’s collective activities, such as the running of Melbourne Artist-Run Initiatives. Sandra produces an ongoing series of interviews with artists currently running to over 300, including two volumes of interviews recording the numerous roles taken on by the artist when running an artists’ space in Artists/Artist Run Spaces – interviews with coordinators of 6 Melbourne Artists Spaces (1998 and 2002). Other publications and catalogues by Bridie include Fictional and Actual Artists Space (1996), Talk Artists Initiative Archive (online and in catalogue form, 1997-2000), Artists as Curators (2001), Active Imagination and Tangential Practice (2006) and The artist as composite (2009), The Grid Show: A structured space, Articulations (2012), Unintended Refrains (2015) and Sandra Bridieb.19–: Eight fictions (2017).
As a teacher, Sandra’s pedagogical projects – teaching projects with an exhibition outcome include, Active Imagination with students from Birmingham Institute of Art and design, UK, 2006, Tangential Practice, with VCA students, 2006, Material Practice, with University of Melbourne Students from the School of Creative Arts, 2007, Lateral Investigation, 2008, Ten Installation Grids, 2009, The Grid Show: A structured space, reprised with articulations, 2012, Two Options (2016) with VCA students and Equidistant Objects: A Cagean experiment (2019). Each of these projects included a publication with documentation, including interviews with participants regarding their working processes.
Sandra is currently Director of the George Paton Gallery, Melbourne University.
Sandra Bridie | artist-curator 