Photo credit: Anne Purkiss
Introduction
Denise Bryan is an artist who makes sculptures, mixed media installations and performance works that have been shown both nationally and internationally. In addition, she has extensive teaching experience and has run many workshops in a variety educational of community settings.
During her career she has undertaken residencies, made commissioned work and work involving local communities in non gallery spaces, she has often worked with historical museums. She has curated exhibitions and organised opportunities for other artists. She is based in London and works as a lecturer at Oxford Brookes University.
Artist Statement
I work across media, making objects, photographic series, installations, and performance pieces. I aim for the work to be thought provoking and through my choice of materials and subject matter I seek to provoke my audience into thinking about the issues and the concepts that have motivated the work. The materials used to create my sculptures often have a conceptual value that underpins the work, in fact my sculptures have been described as “Hands on Conceptualism”. Collecting has always held a fascination for me, my studio increasingly resembles a scrap store, I can’t stop collecting things that have the potential to become objects: sculptures. My collections, including sound, photographs and video, have often been collected whilst travelling, the resulting works act as a narrative of personal experience and in a broader sense the pieces interrogate our relationship to the exotic, our physical experience of travel and how we navigate ourselves in this post colonial, global environment.
I often develop ideas through drawing, as the work develops I like to explore the relationship between sculptural forms and our bodies, sometimes incorporating photographic or video image and sound. I am interested in creating new spatial dynamics. Recently I have started to combine drawn elements and 3D representation using Virtual Reality software and other new technologies, this research investigates the mapping of actual objects, bodies and landscapes in a virtual environment.