Bridget Kennedy spent one month hosted by Bellingham Heritage Centre as part of ENTWINED: Rural. Land. Lives. Art. Her residency explored the layered histories of Northumberland’s landscape, focusing on human interaction with place, materials, and time. Bridget’s practice spans installation, sculpture, photography, and video, combining traditional craft-based making with Fine Art experimentation and a DIY sensibility. Each work is developed in direct response to site and circumstance, reflecting her enduring interest in how local geology, ecology, and human activity intertwine.
Bridget’s work often engages with the processes and metaphors of weaving. Over several years, she has constructed her own looms, taken them into landscapes, and integrated natural or found materials into the weavings. For her, weaving operates both as a literal act and a conceptual framework, a means of reflecting on interdependence, creative thought, and the deep connections between humans and the animal, mineral, and plant life around them. Her approach asks how methods of making evolve from specific environments and how local resources shape cultural relationships with place.
During her ENTWINED residency, Bridget drew inspiration from the Heritage Centre’s collection of artefacts, particularly a series of archival photographs documenting the 1911 Bellingham floods. These images led her to the Hareshaw Linn, whose course and history revealed a narrative of transformation—from the site of the 19th-century Hareshaw Iron Works, once an intense hub of industrial activity, to today’s ancient woodland and conservation area. To reflect on these cycles of change, Bridget undertook a walking and weaving journey along the burn, using a portable loom strung with yarn dyed in iron ore pigment. At selected points in the landscape, she wove fragments of place into the fabric, integrating her physical movement and material process with the history embedded in the land.
Her residency culminated in an open studio at the Heritage Centre, where she installed small, site-specific responses among the museum displays, creating intimate dialogues between past and present. Bridget also collaborated with Northumberland National Park to lead a workshop with participants from Newcastle. The group walked from the Heritage Centre to Hareshaw Burn, weaving with backstrap looms and incorporating gathered grasses into their work, creating tactile records of shared experience and place.
Bridget Kennedy’s residency illuminated the deep entanglement of landscape, material, and memory, revealing how the act of making can become both an exploration of history and a gesture of connection to the living land.
