James Aldridge for his exhibition shares a new flag called Still a Badger Boy and fills the board with Alphabet.
Still a Badger Boy blends a photograph of James’s face with a drawing of a badger. The drawing developed out of a residency at the Hawkwood Centre for Future Thinking in Gloucestershire, where James explored his family’s links to the Cotswold hills. The title references stories James’s Dad told him of his childhood, when badgers would visit their garden from the woods behind, to knock over the dustbin and lick out James’s baby food jars.
Alphabet stitches together drawings and photographs of animal tracks, found by James on walks in Wiltshire, and during a residency with Spud in the New Forest, a written language left behind, to be discovered in the mud.
James Aldridge is a visual artist, based in Wiltshire, UK. James graduated in 1996 in Fine Art (Sculpture) from UCA. His practice uses walking, collecting and making, to research the value of embodied experiences of places, and the overlapping experiences of humans and other animals. He has a particular interest in Queer and Neurodivergent perspectives on ecosystems, and the opportunities these provide us to see beyond division and categorisation.
www.jamesadlridge-artist.co.uk and www.queerriver.com @JamesAldridgeArt