Born 1980 Dover, Kent, Edward Bridges has spent most of his life in Deal, a small fishing town on the Kentish coast. He spent some years in Bangladesh as a child, and also summers in Pakistan and Nigeria. 

        The artist draws inspiration from his ancestors, family, childhood and the sea. Playing deliberately with real and dreamlike elements, Edward is interested in exploring the conflict between real and imagined states of mind. It is simultaneously a believable character world which includes people and animals, nature and geographic locations, which allow Edward to play out a series of scenarios which probe ideas of fear, loneliness, death, violence, but also of humour, pleasure, wit and fun. Edward is interested in synthesising these dramas into highly aesthetic, often beautiful, landscapes which, because of their commitment to emotional honesty and pictorial inventiveness, have a universal quality which generously reaches out to the viewer. 

        Edward's paintings are thematically tied to the relationship between the known and the unknowable. The somewhat festive atmosphere of the crowds that surround the hunted or beached animals creates an uneasy balance between a sense of pathos for the animal, and a delirious sense of excitement at the macabre and mysterious event. These paintings are both funfair and funeral, real and intangible, and effortlessly conjure surreal and dreamlike states.