REPAIR

Claire Bridge and Yuqing Chen confront legacies of gendered violence and cultural oppression. Together they highlight language as sites of culturally specific transmission of violence. Chen speaks from her Chinese Mandarin background and Bridge from her culturally Deaf / Auslan background with her body-associated, spatial use of visual language. Together, their works share a language of materials; both using fabric, embroidery, stitching and weaving and incorporating these in various ways with digital images, photography or found objects.

Claire Bridge draws on the pivotal essay by Audre Lorde, The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action, to confront the nature of silence and silencing alone with its embodied experience through soft sculptural works.

Yuqing Chen uses photography and stitched mark making, both viscerally imposed on the body and rupturing the surface of photographs, elucidating Confucian instructions on obedience and the role of women in the Chinese family.