B A Hlioui Art

Bridget Anthony-Hlioui’s art is a journey to find peace and connection featuring simplicity through complexity. In her work, she creates a balance between perceived depth and flatness, oftentimes turning the subjects into abstractions by riddling her pieces with patterns of colors, motifs, and symbols. 

  The process to discover her art has taken on a therapeutic role in her life. From an early age, she
  found herself pondering "what makes a home?"  It has been this question that has magnetized the  
  needle of her compass and the direction of her work. With family in the United States and  Tunisia,
  she finds herself most at home while on the journey to find her art. Motifs and subject  matter  
  teeter between the natural and man-made as she explores her surroundings and their relation to her
  awareness of the spiritual and ever-present Divine.

  Bridget graduated from The Corcoran School of Art with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Photography  
  in 1993. She is an advocate for art as therapy, having witnessed its benefits while teaching in the DMV area. Her work is shown locally and nationally. She resides in the Washington, DC region. 

You can find her online at www.bahlioui.com and on Instagram @bridget_a_hlioui.

                   Bridget's Artist Statement              

I explore “what makes a home?” through patterns, layers, and symbols.  My mixed media process is a search forconnection to our physical and spiritual worlds expressed through patterns of natural and man-made symbols. The layers in my pieces emulate how I experience reflection.  The physical process involves sketching, measuring, tracing, and making templates for my patterns. From there I work back and forth between the overlaid patterns and the scenic backgrounds using ink pens, colored pencils, watercolor, and gouache paints.     

A portion of my inspiration stems from sharing my home with a refugee family as a child. This opened my mind to diversity and the needs of displaced people. I also draw inspiration from our world’s cultures,  tessellations, the geometric patterns of Islamic art and American quilts. To bridge having family and homes in two countries, I use many symbols from Tunisian culture. My work is a mental reflective journey that leads to finding how simplicity can lead to complexity and back again, much like how we are created in nations and tribes but are all of the human race. What really fascinates me is that the process of juxtaposing patterns against the scenic memories of my travels never fails to remind me of the Creator, signs in nature, and our final spiritual home.

Curriculum Vitae