Fabric artist Kate Bridger brings summer blooms to the Nelson Library
By Contributor
Summer blooms glorious at the library in stunning fabric paintings by Nelson artist Kate Bridger. Five flower portraits are delicately rendered, resulting in a surprisingly painterly take on petal, leaf, and glass.
Kate has been a practicing fabric artist since the early 1980s. Over the years she has invented, refined and experimented with materials, subject matter, and techniques, allowing her to portray landscapes, streetscapes, wildlife, abstracts, architecture and a variety of subject matter in meticulous detail.
Her summertime Library exhibition, Kate says, is “inspired in part by the beautiful work of (Nelson florist) Bellaflora’s talented owner and floral artist, Kyla. I began working on a few ‘everlasting’ flower arrangements earlier this year.”
These paintings, titled Everlasting Arragements #1 and #2, are joined by fabric renditions of sunflowers, gerberas, and a “tipsy rose.”
Kate creates each bloom individually, using carefully chosen fabrics and stitch techniques in an effort to recreate the flowers’ unique properties.
“Fabric is a fabulous medium to work with because it provides instant texture: it can be layered to create subtle shading and depth,” she says. “Perhaps best of all, it is a relatively unstable medium and its fickleness and unpredictability often lead me down paths I had not foreseen.”
Kate’s work shows through July and August.
