Art Island: Persimmon Blackbridge – Sculptor

Video (13:59): In the final episode of ART ISLAND Season 2, filmmaker Zsofin Sheehy meets Persimmon Blackbridge in her Anderson Road home and studio [on Hornby Island, British Columbia, Canada]. From struggling to colour inside the lines as a child to discovering sculpture during a time of personal crisis, Persimmon turned carving into a transformative outlet for self-expression.

Credits

A Film By – Zsofin Sheehy
Associate Producer – Emma Walter
Location Sound – Emma Walter
Sound Mix & Design – Matt Copeland
Title Animation – Grigorii Kniagnitskii
Colour – Bogdan Mykytenko

Persimmon Blackbridge

For over 45 years, Persimmon Blackbridge has been a trailblazing sculptor, writer, curator, and performer. Her contributions to queer art began with Still Sane (1984), a collaboration exploring the psychiatric incarceration of lesbians, and continued with her work in the 1990s as part of the lesbian art collective Kiss & Tell. Their projects, including Drawing the Line and True Inversions, challenged censorship and reshaped feminist discourse. A pioneer in disability arts, Blackbridge’s Sunnybrook: A True Story with Lies examined abuse in the Woodlands Institution and won the Ferro-Grumley Prize. In 1998, her collaboration with former Woodlands inmates on From the Inside/Out helped secure reparations for survivors. Later, her exhibit Constructed Identities reframed disability as central to, not separate from, human experience. Blackbridge’s art consistently challenges societal norms, addressing oppression, identity, and institutional abuse and recently, the impacts of climate change on us all. – Hornby Arts

[The copyright of the video above remains with the original holder and it is used here for the purpose of education, comparison and criticism only.]