Boi boi the labourer, from the series The sport and fair play of Aussie rules

Eric Bridgeman is a multidisciplinary artist who uses photography, installation, video, drawing and painting as forms of astute social and cultural commentary. His work often considers the impacts of Western influence and ethnography on contemporary cultural identity. Belonging to the Yuri clan of Chimbu Province, Papua New Guinea, Bridgeman co-founded the artist collective Haus Yuriyal (‘Men of the Yuri’) with family members from Jiwaka, Papua New Guinea, in which he is both artist and facilitator of the group’s contemporary art projects.

Bridgeman’s first major body of work, The sport and fair play of Aussie rules, includes photographs and videoed performances that deconstruct gender and race politics in Australia. In photographs Boi boi the labourer (2009) and Vicki (wife) beater (2009), figures parody masculine stereotypes through Bridgeman’s use of costuming, make-up, and props. Body paint and bright, overdrawn lips give these subjects a clown-like appearance that sits in tension with the alcohol bottles, sports paraphernalia, and labourer’s tools around them – markers of ‘rugged manliness’. Bridgeman’s portraits take on a humorous, carnivalesque atmosphere that highlights how gender is constructed and performed, while questioning how this intersects with racial stereotypes.