Sam Brightwell
I'm a non-binary artist, writer and single parent based in Bournemouth, UK. I studied Fine Art at Arts University Bournemouth when my son was small but left before completing the degree because life was chaotic and making art was courting more chaos. I felt pressured by tutors to make large-scale installations and performance art and needed to find my way into my practice, which has always been intimate, craft-based and process-driven. Due to my 'missing' formal qualification and my experiences as a person with a diagnosis of Bipolar II Disorder, I identified as an outsider artist for a while. My work explores chaos, layers, dissociative identities, impulse, breakdown and burnout through photographic and printing techniques, collage, paint, stitching, crochet and found materials. I create as a form of meditation, seeking moments of altered consciousness through immersion in processes that can be rhythmic and repetitive. Work is still made in fragments of available time, even though my son is now 6'2".
