Nessie Stonebridge’s art depict wild birds paused in frozen moments of time, their wings, talons and beaks contorted in muscular action. Her images represent the act of flight, the feeling of a territorial challenge and the swift, often brutal transition between life and death.
"Her brooding charcoal drawings and electric oil paintings capture the intensity of the bare life of animals. The iconography here is certainly loaded. For example, any depiction of a swan will invoke the Greek myths of Leda and its erotic charge in Renaissance art. Or, we could say that imagery of avian flight inevitably suggests the photographic motion studies of the 1870s (Etienne-Jules Marey, Eadweard Muybridge), which prefigures cinema and nature documentaries. These citations may help place Stonebridge’s work within human culture, but we must look elsewhere, to the non-human, to engage with them properly.
Stonebridge’s work draws on observations from life, not from art history books. She lives on a bucolic farm in Norfolk, her studio surrounded by fields, water, and avian passers-by. Nature here is torrid and calamitous. Recently, she spotted a swan with its head chopped off; nearby was a dead fox. It is the brutality of this encounter that fascinates Stonebridge, not the folksy obscenity that it conjures: namely, the possibility of witchcraft or animal sacrifice in modern Norfolk. The dead swan and fox are evidence of mortality, of everyday death in the animal kingdom. It is this mortality that excites Stonebridge’s imagination, and it may be no surprise that she was once an enthusiastic rock climber, a sport that dramatizes the vertiginous balance between life and death. Alluding to this love of climbing, Stonebridge often binds her paintings with climbing rope, as if keeping them from spinning off.
Like the climber resisting gravity, her paintings and drawings dream of flight. But while her vortexlike works appear to spin out into space, it is their slowness that is, perhaps, fundamental. Her painting and drawing process involves a durational labour of accretion and deletion. She applies paint or charcoal, removes and layers it, expending hours and weeks in a meditative focus on line, form or colour. Her works are ultimately the work of a walker, maker and observer. Stonebridge, like the rest of us, seems to love birds because they live and die at a velocity that we can only marvel at."
Colin Perry, writer and art critic
EDUCATION
2003 Post Graduate Dip, Painting, City & Guilds, London
1994 BA (Hons) Sculpture, University of Hertfordshire
SELECTED EXHIBITIONS
2022. Charlotte Fraser Ceramic & Glass Prize
2022 In the House Norwich Holkham House Norfolk
2022 Contemporary Landings Snape Suffolk
2021 Somewhere Unexpected Norwich Castle Open, Norwich
2021 Nowhere, Cley21 (curated by Amanda Geitner)
2019 Borderlines, Cley19, Cley Norfolk (curated by Dyad Creative)
2018 An Appetite for Risk The Cut, Halesworth (curated by Amanda Geitner)
2018 Bird after Bird The Steel Rooms Brigg
2018 Inheritance Norwich Castle Open, Norwich
2017 Bird after Bird GroundWork Gallery Kings Lynn
2014 British Birds CARSLAW St* LUKES, London (solo)
2013 Volta, Basel.CARSLAW St* LUKES Two person presentation
2012 UNTITLED, Miami
2011 ‘100’, Langford120, Melbourne, Australia
2011 Charlie Smith London
2011 “Polemically Small” The Torrance Art Museum, California, US
2010 “Black – A Referential Void”, Madder139 London
2010 Tightly Drawn, Playhouse Yard, London (solo)
2009 Postures of Delirium, Madder139, London (solo)
2007 Under the Arches, Berlin
2006 A little house in Peckham, Peckham London
2006 Life2, Microsoft Corporation, London
2006 Size Matters, Madder Rose, London (solo)
2005 Insignificunt, Rosy Wilde Gallery, London (solo)
2005 Ravenous fish and tasty plankton, The Empire, Vyner Street, London
2003 Fresh Art, London (solo)
RESIDENCIES / AWARDS
2013-2014 Gore Point, Norfolk
2007 Celeste Art Prize (shortlist) (catalogue)
1997-2001. Art’s Fellowship, Digswell Arts Trust, Hertfordshire
BIBLIOGRAPHY
2014 , Joe Turnbull, Garageland Review, May 2014
2014 Art review of the year - adigest of 2014
2009 Roy Exley, Postures of Delirium
2009 Modern Edition, Contemporary Abstraction by UK Artists.
2008 Phillips Art Expert, Phillips de Pury
2007 Jane Neal, Saatchi Daily Magazine, Emerging Artist of the Week