The Weight of Water

Winner of the 2023 Exploration Emerging Artist Award

**News Update** Bridget has been appointed the Australian Commissioner for the 12th Ulsan International Woodcut Print Festival in South Korea. The invitation only event will showcase the work of artists from 11 countries, with five printmakers from each country represented. Bridget has been announced as a finalist in both the 2024 Michael Beazer Works on Paper Prize showing at East Gippsland Art Gallery and the 2024 Heysen Prize for Landscape at Hahndorf Academy in South Australia.

Bridget Hillebrand’s creative practice explores the deconstruction of the two-dimensional image plane and examines the materiality of physical and implied interruptions in constructed printed paper. Her recent works reflect on the fragility and changing ecology of oceans and river systems. She works mainly with large sheets of printed light weight washi papers and experiments with dimensional properties through the act of folding, tearing, layering and stitching

'My recent works continue my ongoing inquiry into our often tenuous connection to the preservation of natural waterways. Hiking amid remote mountainous regions in Japan in 2023 and a recent residency exploring the rugged terrain of Wollemi National Park in NSW have been deeply influential. Printing on engineering felt and large sheets of light-weight washi paper I experiment with dimensional properties through the act of folding, tearing, layering and stitching. The interplay of repetitive printed marks suggest refraction of light on water, protected in the gentle folds of floating paper, cradled and held.' Artist Statement2024

About Washi Paper

wa (和) meaning Japanese and shi (紙) meaning paper.

Traditionally processed by hand from the long fibres of the inner bark of the paper mulberry (kōzo) plant, the mitsumata shrub (Edgeworthia chrysantha) or the gampi tree, washi paper is resilient to being torn, is repellent to insects and water resistant. Due to its adaptability and durability washi has long been used for Japanese clothing and furnishings such as shoji (sliding doors) for dividing interior spaces and byōbu (folding screens) as well as lamps, fans and sun umbrellas. Today washi is also used to repair historical and cultural items in museum and art collections around the world because of its durability and low impurities. The oldest washi paper in existence is over 1000 years old.

The natural imperfections of the printed washi paper in ‘The weight of water’ reveal subtleties in fibre, tone and texture.  When extending the traditional parameters of how works on paper are presented I continue to explore the enduring strength and quality of washi paper and its potential as sculptural form. 

Catalogue essay by Andrew Stephens, 2024

Brink Deeply inquisitive about the natural world, Bridget Hillebrand produces bodies of work that converse with ecological systems and reflect upon human impact. They are not strident: her works gently whisper themselves into nuanced territories between the physical and immaterial worlds. Call it divine, mystical, transcendent. Whatever the case, this meditative between-space has the qualities of something with which all humans are deeply connected. Water: soft, powerful, and brimming with vitality.

Seepage Water is almost everywhere on Earth and it is endlessly transitional and cyclical. It evaporates, billows into clouds, falls as rain, freezes, melts and manifests as ‘weather’. It can be a delicate gossamer (the silky mist from a waterfall), or it can be immensely heavy (at the bottom of the ocean’s Mariana Trench, eleven kilometres down). And it can be everything in between. Seeping from rivers, oceans, inland seas, wetlands, aquifers and lakes, it infiltrates the human realm via tributaries, escarpments, rock, and between grains of sand and soil. It is life. Humans evolved from it, are largely made of it, and are ceaselessly drawn to it. So, too, is Hillebrand, whose new works in The weight of water are made with washi paper and engineering felt, all suspended to suggest precious containment of an unruly flow forming lay-lines in the landscape, scored over deep time.  These works are unafraid: they do not press themselves demurely to the wall, but boldly seize their space, enticing human interlopers into their presence. This assertiveness began with Hillebrand winning the 2021 Experimental Print Prize (Castlemaine Art Museum) when her work first transitioned from wall to floor, challenging two-dimensional printmaking conventions. Now, even more forthright in a dialogue with space, her fragile-yet-robust washi paper structures breathe within air currents, and are responsive to shifting shadows and light; the felt, by contrast, asserts its firmness, absorbing light and sound, eliciting a sense of resilience. 

Humans have an impact on these works. Their movement, shadows and sounds reverberate as they move around them, in the same way that, on a grander scale, their existence influences Earth’s atmosphere and ecologies. Amid Hillebrand’s layered, floating works, so exquisitely printed, an enduring concern for environmental wellbeing manifests. This connects all her projects: it may be said that it is a single, reflective journey.Aqua profunda Hillebrand’s care and curiosity is expressed in her persistent engagement with nature in her daily life – rock-climbing, swimming, and hiking are central to the way she inhabits the world. These activities are inextricable from her art-making processes. Her many climbs at places such as Mount Arapiles (the site upon which her 2016 PhD was centred), her walks in Japan amid torrential rain, and her other explorations and recent residencies in places such as the Wollemi National Park, all inform her practice. Hillebrand’s experiences of climbing, a pursuit that brings her face-to-face with strata of rock, are implicit in much of her work, recorded in the marks, lines and textures she inscribes, carves and prints; so, too, are her extensive experiences with water, with the very weight of its ubiquitous presence in oceans, rivers, dams, billabongs and creeks.  In new works such as Shift I & II, Tether I & II,Watershed, or Fulcrum I, II & III, Hillebrand makes evident these experiences with water and of being dwarfed by the power of nature, especially by the many ways in which water seeps, trickles and pools throughout so many different types of topographies. This is all conveyed in the presence of Hillebrand’s suspended works, delicate and vigorous in equal measure, which haunt as they beckon. Amid all this, how carefully ought the human being tread?

ARTIST PROFILE: Bridget Hillebrand is an interdisciplinary artist based in Naarm/Melbourne living and working on Boon Wurrung/Bunurong Country. She completed her PhD project Climbing the Landscape: Mt Arapiles – explorations in place and the printed image, at Monash University (2016). Bridget has received a number of awards including winner of the 2021 Experimental Print Prize at Castlemaine Art Museum, Victoria and her print ‘High Tide’ was recently acquired by the Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery. Her work is held in national, state and regional galleries as well as private collections in Australia and public and private collections internationally.