Brigid Collins
Brigid is an artist and educator whose practice is deeply rooted in close and loving observation of the natural world. She makes paintings and drawings inspired by poetry as well as working in three-dimensions and with the form of the book and is most often drawn to the tactility and sensuousness of materials such as pastels, watercolour, porcelain, tissue, wire and wax, encapsulating fragility and strength in equal measure. She has collaborated and published books with poets and authors Seamus Heaney, Kathleen Jamie and Kirsty Gunn and, most recently, also with poet Christine De Luca, while spending a year as Artist in Residence at Dr. Neil’s Garden in Duddingston, Edinburgh, where artworks, poems and a short film which resulted from their collaboration were exhibited at mid-Summer it Playfair’s wonderful Thomson’s Tower, set deep in the garden on the shores of the Duddingston loch.
Having just spent such a very happy and healing time working almost exclusively outdoors, Brigid is currently focussing on developing new work and hopes to begin to find ways to build on this practice of working ‘en plein air’ while, at the same time, enjoying time being back in the studio which really is an extension of herself and a place to create in a different way, akin to inhabiting one of her favourite poems…