For New York-based artist Bridget Mullen, the most important aspect of making art is the making itself. Painting, as Bridget sees it, takes place as a mixture of intuition, inventiveness and random occurrence. Her paintings are built up, layered and worked at over long periods of time, employing a vast array of mediums and techniques. She does not want her works to exist as singular, self-contained objects that refer only to themselves, but as spaces which contain that entire temporality of their making. As such, her paintings are not ends in themselves, but rather a means towards inhabiting the process by which they were brought into being, as well as the consciousness of the maker. The viewer is invited not only to experience that process of artistic creation via the painted surface, but to conceptually take part in the making process; for Bridget, the encounter between viewer and painting is what ultimately allows for the work’s coming-into- being. As she puts it, the painting “requires your standing before it to complete it.”
To inhabit the world of Bridget’s paintings is to step into a dreamlike, cartoonish reality brushed by unsettling elements of the surreal. It is a world in which half-formed shapes and figures whirl in a constant state of emerging or dissolving, where the characters you meet spawn uncanny replicas of themselves, where colours roll endlessly into what looks like the distance, but which becomes flat and solid when you stretch out your hand towards it. The figures in Bridget’s paintings are imbued with her own cartoon- induced anxiety when confronted with an imagined, dreamed or virtual reality in which there are no apparent boundaries around what might happen. In some paintings, the same figure is repeated over and over with slight variations that imply movement, gesture, a series of moments or metaphysical potentialities all existing concurrently. Her characters are attached to no specific moment, transcending the time and space of the painting by virtue of the multiplicity of their presence.
Although Bridget experiments with sculptural modes and mediums, such as ceramics, she has found the actual process of shaping clay and three-dimensional forms to be far more significant within her work than the completed sculptural object. Working in three dimensions has, in this way, functioned as a vehicle for reconceptualising space in her paintings as an interplay of object and air, solid matter and open space. Certainly, there is an implied density to Bridget’s figures in her shadows and highlights, the suggestion of convexity in her subtle shading. Yet this is consistently undercut by bold blocks and stripes of uniform colour, stark outlines and more cartoonish, cut-out shapes, suggesting a kind of flimsy unreality to the figures being projected before us. What prevails in Bridget’s paintings is a sense of flatness, the overlapping layers converging to create what Bridget refers to as a “build-your-own-reality situation” in which depth is both a shallow illusion and a vast, unrolling endlessness, where figures are both solid volumes and paper- thin, two-dimensional shapes.
Bridget has participated in multiple artistic residencies across the United States, as well as countless group shows. Having displayed her work in national and international solo exhibitions as far as Amsterdam, she is now working towards a solo show that will open in Madrid next year.
. 
