Bridget Allen
Postcards from the River
Styx Creative Communicator – Postcards from the River
As a Styx Living Laboratory Trust Creative Communicator, Bridget worked from a printmaking studio at the Christine Heremaia Field Centre, creating a series titled “Postcards from the River”.
Using the intaglio process of dry-point etching, she produced small, hand-printed works that responded directly to the Pūharakekenui | Styx River and its catchment. For this series she:
Experimented with dyes made from plant material gathered within the catchment
Soaked paper in river-sourced botanicals to achieve soft, earthy tones
Developed images that echo the textures and colours of the awa
The resulting postcards bring together ecology, art, and place-based storytelling, capturing the character of the river through slow, tactile making. Each print feels like a small, held fragment of the landscape – a moment of observation and care translated into ink and paper.
About the Artist
Practice: Visual artist, printmaker, landscape architect
Location: Ōtautahi Christchurch, Aotearoa New Zealand
Bridget Allen is a Christchurch-based visual artist, printmaker, and landscape architect whose work grows out of a deep connection with plants, landscapes, and the everyday ways people move through their environments. With training in fine arts, horticulture, and landscape architecture, she brings together creative practice and environmental design, often working where art, ecology, and community overlap.
Bridget’s art is strongly informed by her life as a gardener and cyclist. The rhythms of riding through the Port Hills, tending gardens, and noticing subtle seasonal changes all feed into her imagery and ideas.
Artistic Practice & Themes
Bridget’s practice is grounded in printmaking and environmental art, with a particular focus on how people move through and shape the places they live in.
Key aspects of her work include:
Printmaking: Dry-point etching and reduction woodblock prints that capture motion, energy, and changing light.
Landscape and environment: Ongoing attention to coastal margins, red zone areas, river corridors, and hill landscapes.
Movement and cycling: Works that grow out of bike journeys and the sensation of travelling through space and terrain.
Botanicals and ecology: Frequent use of plant forms and natural dyes, highlighting the relationship between human activity and local ecologies.
Her “Sunrose” series of woodblock prints is a good example of this approach: bold, layered imagery developed from close observation of plants and cycling routes. One design was later produced as a cycling helmet graphic, literally putting her art into motion on the streets.
Background & Training
Bridget completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts, majoring in sculpture, before expanding her interests into green sculpture, horticulture, and landscape design. Her curiosity about plants and large-scale garden environments led her to work in significant gardens, including the Eden Project in Cornwall.
She later studied landscape architecture at Lincoln University, completing a major design project focused on post-earthquake landscapes in the Brooklands red zone. This training strengthened her ability to think about planting, water, and human use of space together, and continues to inform both her artwork and public projects.
Community Initiatives & Workshops
Community connection sits at the heart of Bridget’s work.
She co-founded the New Brighton Stitch-O-Mat Charitable Trust, a community sewing space that provides access to equipment, skills, and resources so locals can repair, upcycle, and create textiles together. The project supports waste reduction, creativity, and social connection in a welcoming, low-cost environment.
Bridget also runs Pop-up Printmaking workshops: location-specific dry-point etching sessions using a portable press and historic images of local areas. Participants are invited to respond to their surroundings and to the histories of the places they live in, turning printmaking into a tool for storytelling and shared learning.
Through studio work, classes, and collaborations, Bridget continually shares her skills and encourages others to explore their own relationships with place.
Landscape Architecture & The Green Lab
Alongside her art practice, Bridget works professionally in landscape architecture and community green-space design. She holds a leadership role with The Green Lab (formerly Greening the Rubble), a charity that co-designs and builds urban green spaces with communities in Ōtautahi.
In this work she:
Collaborates with residents and organisations to create planted gathering spaces in underused urban areas
Brings an artist’s sensibility to the design of seating, pathways, and plantings
Helps shape projects that support biodiversity, climate resilience, and neighbourhood wellbeing
Her Styx residency and Postcards from the River series sit within this wider pattern of practice, where art, environmental care, and community engagement are closely intertwined.
Ongoing Focus
Across her roles as artist, gardener, educator, and landscape architect, some threads run consistently through Bridget’s practice:
Attention to place: Close observation of rivers, hill tracks, coastal edges, and red zone land, and the stories they hold.
Care for landscapes: A belief that art and design can help heal, restore, and reimagine damaged or overlooked environments.
Community connection: Working with others to co-create projects, rather than making work in isolation.
Everyday joy: Celebrating simple acts like riding a bike, tending a garden, or sending a hand-printed postcard from the river.
Bridget’s work invites people to see their local environments not as static backdrops, but as living places we can care for, move through, and reshape together.
