Photo: Jonathan Turner
Simon Persighetti and Katie Etheridge
Take Me to the Bridge
Katie Etheridge & Simon Persighetti investigate the viewpoints created by Leeds Bridge, as a set of portals or transition points. Transferring photographs of bridge views and crossings onto their bodies, Etheridge & Persighetti become surface or canvas recording and re-presenting captured images of the city. Re-photographed in situ, the artist’s bodies become porous to the city in a series of images that blur the edges between street and skin.
Leeds Bridge is such an important spot in the history of Leeds and the history of film, I love the idea of the people and traffic photographed and those images transferred onto the body and re-photographed as if our substantial flesh wasn’t there, as if the pavement came through our feet. The here and the not here. We are all passing through. Annie Lloyd
“To wander through a diverse terrain is to feel the surroundings pass through one’s body as the body passes through the surroundings”(Moore 1986: 57)
Katie Etheridge & Simon Persighetti investigate the viewpoints created by Leeds Bridge, as a set of portals or transition points. Transferring photographs of bridge views and crossings onto their bodies, Etheridge & Persighetti become surface or canvas recording and re-presenting captured images of the city. Re-photographed in situ, the artist’s bodies become porous to the city in a series of images that blur the edges between street and skin.
Take Me to the Bridge is concerned with the idea of the bridge as habitual, everyday crossing point, but it seeks to amplify the metaphor of transition and the notion of place becoming part of the mental architecture of its daily users. Those who encounter the work are invited to participate and be added to the project gallery.
“A car is seen crossing the bridge, etched upon the palm of your hand.”
About the Artists
Katie Etheridge works across live and mediated art forms to make performances and interventions that investigate the interrelationships between people and places, and artists and audiences.
Simon Persighetti is a core member of Wrights & Sites, a group of performance-trained artists who have been producing site-specific performances, walking projects and other art works since their formation in 1997.
Etheridge and Persighetti’s collaborative practice focuses on finding ways of amplifying the materiality and the invisible of place while inviting participants to explore their own relationships with place.
