Cameron Bridgeman

Biography

Cameron Bridgeman was born in George Town, Grand Cayman in 1997. He was educated in Grand Cayman and left the Cayman Islands in 2016 to study Foundation Art at the Leith School of Art in Edinburgh, Scotland. The following year he transferred to Year 2 of a BA(Hons) in Fine Art, specialising in sculpture at The Glasgow School of Art, Scotland, where he is currently completing his 4th year.

Personal Statement

I enjoy searching for a variety of materials that interest me. These are usually found objects and discarded materials in the street; shoes, books, scrap metal and wood, bicycles, typewriters, aircraft parts and industrial materials. I like to take objects that people have discarded and no longer have use for. I want to give new meaning by reimagining an object or materials and creating something new.

I work intuitively with found objects, taking them apart and experimenting with reformatting them, playing with the different forms and textures that the natural objects possess. I place and attach objects that I think complement each other.

This process has come from a childhood fascination of taking things apart to find out how they work. I am attracted to the patterns, the rhythms and the sequences that the objects reveal.

I usually render the object with a single colour in order to unify all the parts of the object to create a whole.
The most interesting thing about using found objects for me is the history of the materials. Once the objects have been abandoned the original purpose for their creation is lost. Taking these objects apart and remaking them to create new sculptures, I am creating a new purpose, a new history, for these materials.

Project Ability Glasgow
Trongate 103 Gallery

My last project before the Covid-19 pandemic was working with Project Ability at the Trongate 103 Gallery in Glasgow.

I worked collaboratively with the artist, John Coza, who attends the Aspire Group at Project Ability. My aim was to help him create a body of work that encouraged John to take risks with his artwork.

To date, John and I have experimented with taking photographs of various materials and making drawings of the shapes we find most interesting. This has been a good way to get ideas flowing. From there we have taken this process further by making collages with the images to create interesting shapes and patterns. I encouraged him to keep the process of making and re-making going, continuing to document the work with drawings and photographs.

John is very ambitious and was excited to push his work to the next level. Being able to work with him was very rewarding and we started the project with a lot of enthusiasm which was sadly cut short before he could fully realise his sculptures. I have been introducing John to the same working process that I take with my own studio work. I wanted to encourage him to push his work as far as he could, to not overthink things, to let the work come naturally, but most of all to have fun.

National Gallery of the Cayman Islands – Virtual Tour

National Gallery of the Cayman Islands – Artist Blog

Project Ability GSA Project Blog