Bio
For the past 45 years, Persimmon Blackbridge has worked as a sculptor, writer, curator and performer, as well as being an editor, cleaning lady and very bad waitress.
She has consistently made art on themes of disability since the late 1970s, as well as art, writing and performance on institutionalization, censorship, queer identity, generational alcoholism, feminism and war. Her latest exhibit, Constructed Identities, has been shown across Ontario and is scheduled for Vancouver in 2020.
Winner of the VIVA award for visual arts in 1991, a 1995 Lambda Award in Washington DC, the 1997 Ferro Grumley Fiction Prize in New York City, the 1998 Van City Book Award, and an Emily Carr Distinguished Alumni Award in 2000, Blackbridge’s work been shown across Canada and the U.S., as well as in Europe, Australia and Hong Kong.
Websites:
https://bodiesintranslation.ca/persimmon-blackbridge/
https://tangledarts.org/exhibits/constructed-identities/
https://canadacouncil.ca/about/ajagemo/constructed-identities
Artist Statement
I used to make art out of a passion to tell a particular story, a long complicated story, years in the telling: about when Sheila was locked up, or when I worked at Woodlands, or those long, brutal arguments about porn. By 2009, I was working on an art-story about the dead bodies and political posturing of war. Then my young friend Tempest Grace Gale was murdered. Soon after another friend, Catherine White Holman, died in a plane crash. Then my girlfriend, Della, had a series of small strokes and a fall that fractured her back.
Funerals and medical tests were suddenly the order of the day. My time horizon shrunk down to today, do this day today to day to day. Working on my art, I couldn’t tell the war story anymore. Instead, it became all about what was in front of me: this piece of driftwood (drowned like Tempest was drowned); these wings (like Catherine falling from the sky); this broken hinge (like Della’s fractured spine).
This body of work is built of overlapping splinters of meaning: disability, the femme gaze, dead friends, racism, endless rain – all at once, as these things act on us all at once in our day to day lives. These layered meanings are reflected in the phrases spanning the edges of the panels – not defining a single piece or grouping, but opening questions and evoking alternate understandings of the series as a whole.