Bridget Provan

Bridget Provan is a multi-disciplinary artist who engages in installation, fiber, assemblage, glass work, and photography and has exhibited across New England and the Northeastern United States as well as internationally in Rome. Her awards include multiple scholarships and fellowships from the Rhode Island School of Design as well as a graduate scholarship from Rochester Institute of Technology. Recent exhibitions include Wisdom House in Litchfield, Connecticut, Salem Community College in Carneys Point, New Jersey, Snow Farm-New England Craft in Williamsburg, Massachusetts, Pittsburgh Glass Center, and Peters Valley School of Craft in Sandyston, New Jersey.

The most recent work by Bridget Provan are fiber installations which deal with the theme of domestic violence. Through her own photographic evidence of experiences with domestic violence as a reference, she takes folds of fabric and dyes them in tone to resemble bruises and broken bones from an abusive relationship. These poignant fiber works are assembled into installations which are suspended in the air, displayed against walls and emanating from the floor and ceiling of a gallery. Such a varied array of presentation represents the ‘universal’ impact and solidarity which occurs from such experiences, much like a signal, standard, or even loud cry for help and attention to a vital issue facing women. Some of these fiber installations have vivid red dyes to symbolize grotesque amounts of bleeding and have assembled forms resembling pummeled flesh. These morbid displays of expression exemplify the need for visual art to address important social issues facing women, such as global violence on females, and more specifically, domestic violence.

In regard to the rest of Bridget Provan’s portfolio, one of the most fascinating works would be her photography which incorporates double exposure as well light design to represent what seems to build upon concepts of morbidity and violence, synergizing with the themes contained in the fiber installation works. Her glass works and assemblages are more playful in expression and theme and usually revolve around arachnoids with colourful crystallized legs and sometimes crawling upon metallic illusions of spider webs displayed as artistic patterns. Even the assemblages can contain demising imagery, such as in the case of crystalized glass skulls amidst drifts of pattern and glass. These consistent themes on morbidity and horror using symbolism from ‘beaten’ rags of fabric dyed with bruises and blood-like stains to ominous spiders and apparitional figures in the photography reveals Bridget Provan as a contemplative artist ruminating and musing about the disturbing aspects of past experiences.

Displaced (pictured above) contains a fiber installation of what we have been discussing primarily in the second paragraph of this essay. Although these works can behave as stand-alone fiber sculptures, they work best in unison and synchronization amongst several fiber pieces working together in a space as an installation. The reason would be because as an installation, the various placements from the walls, ceiling, floor, and suspending the air creates an atmosphere of penetrating personal boundaries, which in essence exemplifies the concept of domestic violence and global violence on women. 

A deeply relevant conceptual artist, Bridget Provan brings forth vital issues which become ‘released’ through the battered rags of her fiber works, the symbolism of her crystalized spiders, or the provocative motions and ghostly qualities of her figurative photography. She can be described as an artist who uses interdisciplinary and integrative techniques to investigate personal experiences based on emotional impulses and the disturbance and violation of sensory experiences as well as personal boundaries.

https://bridgetprovan.com