Eric Bridgeman is a recent graduate of the Queensland College of Art (QCA) where he studied photo-media art practice. Issues of gender and sexuality have been central to his undergraduate studies and will form the core of his intended honours and post-graduate research.

As an emerging practitioner he has exhibited widely in Brisbane, including numerous group shows, projects and collaborations. In Late 2007 he received the Artworkers Alliance Award for a graduating photography portfolio. His ‘Blue Collar Picture’ series was selected for exhibition at the Queensland Centre for Photography in November 2007. In early 2008, He worked as a video camera operator for Queensland collaborative ‘The Crash Crew’ for their public art project ‘Shared Sounds,’ which took place in Bundaberg (QLD) with the support of Bundaberg Arts Centre and the Bundaberg Regional Council. He was recently selected as a finalist for the Clayton Utz & Positive Solution Launch Traveling Scholarship. In the coming months he will be working as a visual artist in a collaborative project with Director Daniel Santangeli and Metro Arts, entitled ‘Several Words Associated with Revenge.’

"Blue-Colour Picture" series documents a journey through his heritage in working class Queensland, in a mining town called Cracow; the place where his father grew up, where his family decided to settle and build a life. He has used this town as a backdrop for the exploration of ideas based on blue-collar masculinity in contemporary Australia, and his own emergence into a picture that he has inherited as a young man.

History remembers Cracow as once being an industrial paradise founded on a booming gold mine; with a bustling main street, a school and hospital, billiard halls and a picture theatre. The Bridgeman’s owned one of the saw-mills and a news agency, raised a family and built a life inside these once sturdy monuments of male craftsmanship. He belongs to a long tradition of work and home, and these are the places in which it all came to pass.

The picture has changed somewhat during his ascendancy into man-hood. Today Cracow stands as a relic, a reminder. A silent ode to what his family and the families of other Queenslanders had come to achieve in a time not so long ago. These abandoned houses and dwellings located in Cracow offer him a glimpse into what he has come to realize as his heritage in Queensland.