Bridget W. O’Brien (b. 1997) is a Canadian-American painter living and working in Bloomington, Indiana. She is currently an MFA candidate at Indiana University (2026). She received her BFA in painting from Indiana University-Purdue University and Seoul Women’s University in 2020. After the pandemic settled, she did a post-baccalaureate at the New York Academy of Art. She works primarily with oil, acrylic, and pastel.

Statement

My work investigates the landscape through the language of the human body -- identifying analogous systems to advocate for reciprocity, collective identities, and the awe of being alive in both worlds. For this reason, my work is deeply place-based: softening the ground of the tangible world. I use layers of diaphanous paint and pastel to first sketch the landscape, and then welcome figures inside as they arrive compositionally. I interweave figuration and abstraction to hem these two worlds together, forming non-linear trajectories of time, place, and body.

With roots in the language of editorial cartooning, my paintings serve as visual accompaniments to an increasingly incomprehensible global narrative. Life is mediated and performed through a false sense of control: much in the same way a painting is not a static object, but a fluid expression, negotiating one world with another. Therefor I seek to present an image that is self-aware of its own absurdity, itself, an object of negotiation.

Each work loosely hinges on a collage of images relating to truths and untruths; truths, represented by natural elements, untruths, represented by human detritus and man-made objects, often related to works of poetry or contemporary fiction writing. I utilize non-idiomatic improvisational techniques in an effort to escape the catalyzing event established in the painting ground – accepting the new reality that arrives. In this way, I aim to achieve a suspended harmony; objects and bodies hinging inexplicably to one another, reflecting a world increasingly fragmented and obscured, though reverent.

In its essence, my work is less interested in representing my inner self through personal symbols, and more concerned with expressing universal social experiences through recognizable forms that deteriorate and reseed in a perennial flux.