At the heart of each of her work is a fury of beaks, encircled by fanlike, semi-abstracted wings.
Nessie Stonebridge's paintings depict the explosive energy of the avian world of rural Norfolk where her studio is now based. A flash of light, feathers, beaks; a vortex of vitality, blood, life and death. She paints birds of the wetlands and hinterlands, magisterial swans, herons and raptors. Nessie’s paintings can’t contain this energy – when exhibited, they become bird-like, prone to flight. Displayed in choreographed arrangements, they perch and teeter on their edges, pinioned and as poised as bondage performers. Like a flock frozen in space, Nessie’s painting-assemblages react intuitively to their neighbours and the architectural environment that they inhabit. On display, these works are complete: they are avian exhibitionists.
Resembling some sort of mid-air collision or interstellar explosions, the energy at the centre of Nessie’s paintings and drawings is centrifugal. Often small in scale, they nevertheless reach out beyond their boundaries - their vectors suggestively exploding beyond their pictorial edges into the gallery space. Nessie Stonebridge's latest work draws inspiration from the bucolic, if wild and wind-battered Norfolk coastline, close to where her studio is located.
Previously based in London, Nessie's palette has softened to include more murky and romantic sea greens and stony blues. These more natural hues are offset by vivid moments of post-punk pink and night-crawler black.
The resulting paintings describe a sense of attack and defence between the birds she observes, intimating the basic fight-or-flight behaviour of even the most diminutive of birds. Beyond their avian references, these images are impressive for their counterpoising of formal elements. The gestural brilliance of Nessie's mark-making - her paint is scored and splattered with a palette knife, brush or by hand - is contained within a deliberate and considered structural rigour.
We could go further and say that for all their allusions to natural and animal forces, Nessie's paintings are fundamentally abstract. They re-route the energy of the external world into a painterly lexicon of sharp, curved edges and electric reds and yellows.
She has become increasingly concerned with the edges of her paintings and drawings, often extending them out with sculptural elements, such as painted and concertinaed canvas, or long thin strips of wood resembling thin shelves or props. As gallery-based dramaturgy, these arrangements invoke the restless excitement of Nessie's practice. Her own allusions often verge on the violent or sexualised: she talks of the use of war fans as both weapons and shields in the Samurai arsenal, and of the use of fans in codified symbolic rituals in eighteenth-century France to indicate one's sexual availability during ritual courtship. Nessie talks similarly of the enormous range of lurid colours in nature - the gold and vermillion of fauna and flora near her Norfolk studio: signals of attraction and danger. If we were to distil these works into a single word it would be energy – and all the life-and-death struggles that word implies.
Nessie Stonebridge has exhibited extensively nationally and internationally: At CARSLAW St. Lukes, London; Torrance Art Museum, California; UNTITLED, Miami, Basel and New York.
Recently Nessie has exhibited her work in the east of England at Groundwork Gallery, Kings Lynn (Bird after Bird); Norwich Castle Museum (Inheritance) and (Somewhere Unexpected); and The Cut Halesworth (An Appetite for Risk).
Below is a clip taken of one of Nessie Stonebridge's clay sculptures - making ready for EAST TO EAST at Houghton Hall, 2023