Ella Turner-Bridger
If You Were to Lick My Camera, Surely it Would Blind You.
30 July 2025.
Bolding Gallery presents If You Were to Lick My Camera, Surely it Would Blind You, the first solo presentation of work by Ella Turner-Bridger.
Centering around an obsessive form of self-portraiture, the artist stages what she describes as “intimate collisions” between her own body and the camera. The resulting series of experimental video works reimagine the boundaries between human and machine desire. The exhibition is anchored by the artist's performance 709 Reckoning, in which Turner-Bridger appoints a drone as her partner in a courting ritual.
The camera, however, is not just a means of documentation: Turner-Bridger pushes its traditional mode of filmic representation and the physical device itself to their limits. In Friday Market we become voyeurs, viewing from the detached gaze of a drone while a faceless nude body—in fact the artist's own mother—is laid out, presented to us as anonymous flesh, exposed as an object of viewing. The camera then becomes a victim in You, Piece of Trash, where Mary Jane-clad feet repeatedly kick a GoPro, giving us spinning views of oversaturated green grass and blue sky. The rolling motion allows us to embody the camera and, as each spin slows, we come to want to be kicked again.
Since leaving the Slade School of Fine Art in 2020, Turner-Bridger has worked prolifically as a video editor. A production of Vollmond, by Pina Bausch, liberated the medium of live performance for the artist: as a discipline that cannot be refined or perfected once a piece has begun,
performance challenges the control over every frame that she exercises in her video work. Turner-Bridger recalls seeing “a version of myself that before had only ever existed in my bedroom. I suddenly realised that I could let that be open.” In 709 Reckoning (the title references the colour space used in video editing to standardise colour tones, particularly flesh) machine logic battles human intuition. As we witness a mating dance flitting between flirtation and threat, we ourselves become covetous, playing out our repressed desires. This marks the first time Turner-Bridger has positioned herself directly as muse. By processing her raw personal experience through a sci- fictitious lens, she is able to delicately present the extremities and frailties of human life.
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Ella Turner-Bridger (b. 1998), lives and works in London. Her practice explores dynamics between human and machine, identifying and subverting the camera’s mechanical failures into entry points that question what it means to be human. She received her BA from the Slade School of Fine Art in 2020. Previous exhibitions include Maratona Di Visione at C.F. Contemporary in Italy (2023), Ancient Vessels at A.P.T Gallery (2022), On The Rocks at Unit 1 Gallery (2020), and Keep The Fire Burning at No Format Gallery (2020).