In 2011, Jess Bridgfoot was a visitor to the Bendigo Art Gallery when she came face-to-face with a Vivienne Westwood-designed wedding dress worn by Dita Von Teese.
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Eleven years later, Ms Bridgfoot is now Bendigo Art Gallery director and helped curate and open the popular Elvis: Direct From Graceland exhibition.
Ms Bridgfoot - who is the guest on the latest episode of Bendigo Advertiser podcast The Takeaway with Chris Pedler - said seeing a major international exhibition like The White Wedding Dress in Bendigo blew her mind.
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"I think White Wedding Dress was one of the first exhibitions to kick off the international program at Bendigo Art Gallery," she said. "I didn't work here at the time but I did see that exhibition as a punter.
"I remember being blown away by it and thinking, 'How can an exhibition like this come to my hometown?'"
Seeing the possibilities and potential of the gallery helped her continue down the path of an arts career that was sparked at an early age by her artistic family.
With aspirations of being an artist, Ms Bridgfoot studied art and visual arts before moving on to art management.
"I always wanted to do something artistic, I knew that," she said. "My mum is an art teacher, so I grew up in a pretty creative kind of environment.
"(Soon) I realised I was a better editor than an artist. I said to my lecturers at the time, 'I'll still be an artist'. And they said, 'No, once you go on to the other side, the dark side, you can't be an artist as well'.
"They were right because it is very different being on the other side of it. It's like any management role. It's about people. It's about budgets. It's about program planning, stakeholder management and a lot of fundraising."
Early in her career, Ms Bridgfoot worked through England and Scotland.
"Primarily, I worked for a contemporary performance organisation (but) did all sorts of weird and wonderful things," she said. "It definitely opened up my eyes to this whole incredible sort of British and European world of art."
Ms Bridgfoot's tenure at Bendigo Art Gallery began in 2019, meaning she had been forced to guide the art institution through the COVID-19 pandemic.
Emerging out of it, she has seen gallery-developed exhibition Piinpi: Contemporary Australian Indigenous Fashion open in France during fashion week as well as swarms of people lining up each day for Elvis: Direct From Graceland.
"There's been a lot of COVID (during my tenure) but we rallied and managed to deliver a few exhibitions despite opening and closing seven times," she said.
"We genuinely forgot what it was like to have so many people in the gallery. The opening of Elvis and programs ran with Priscilla was so joyous. The atmosphere was just incredible.
"France was incredible. Unfortunately because of COVID I didn't see it during Fashion Week but it was launched during Fashion Week and from all accounts it was very well received."
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Ms Bridgfoot recently returned from France where she viewed Piinpi on display in the Australian embassy building.
"It was incredible to walk into the Australian embassy building - which is a Harry Seidler-designed building best described as brutalist meets modernist," she said.
"(It's) a big concrete cylindrical building that has this incredible array of joyous Indigenous fashion and motifs we know and love having a riot of a time in the heart of Paris with a view of the Eiffel Tower. It was a terrific experience.
"There were a lot of people there. (Dja Dja Wurrung Group chief executive) Rodney Carter and myself spoke in a lecture theatre full of people about the Indigenous seasons, culture, and kind of, I guess, what it means to be Australian as well. It was a really great experience."
France also offered Ms Bridgfoot the chance to research potential future exhibitions for the Bendigo Art Gallery.
"We do punch above our weight here. We're so passionate about it and there's so much great content swirling around," she said. "I honestly don't know how we're going to top (Elvis).
"A living legend would be amazing, particularly if they come and visit. I'd love to do an Elton John show and there's also a lot of women who are alive right now in the kind of music-pop space.
"We've got some ideas and part of the trip recently was about making some new connections as well. So we are coming back with a raft of exhibition ideas for the next few years. Watch this space, we're cooking up some good ones."
Ms Bridgfoot said there was no set formula to how the gallery selected its major exhibitions.
"It's a mixture of instinct and having this back catalogue of exhibitions to draw upon and say 'well, that worked. That didn't work. That was a fizzer. That went really well'.
"Not every exhibition is a blockbuster, we know that. But all of the exhibitions are equally as important.
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"We kind of look at it over the whole year rather than each exhibition being the finite one. It's a collaborative process. We sit in a room and we thrash out a lot of ideas."
The Bendigo Art Gallery's increasingly strong reputation has been cultivated in the wake of blockbuster exhibitions including - but not limited to - Elvis, Grace Kelly, Tudors to Windsors and Marilyn Monroe.
"I'm so proud to be able to sort of travel internationally and say 'I'm from Bendigo Art Gallery, we're the largest and most successful regional gallery in Australia.' It's an incredible position to be in," Ms Bridgfoot said.
"We're at that point where we can only ask (about hosting exhibitions). People say, 'how did you get this Elvis exhibition?' Well, we just asked. And then we asked again, and then we asked again. There's a bit of courage involved."
Looking to the future, Ms Bridgfoot and her team are working on the further development of the Bendigo Art Gallery.
Following on from the $7.5 million expansion in 2014, the gallery has plans for a $28 million redevelopment that increases gallery space by up to 800 square-metres and will include construction of a new building in View Street.
City of Greater Bendigo approved the redevelopment proposal in October, 2021, and committed no more than $3 million in funding that is contingent on securing external funding for the $25 million balance for the project.
Funding for the gallery would include the $3 million from council, $2.5 million from the Bendigo Art Gallery board, $1.5 million in philanthropic donations and $21 million from state and federal levels of government.
"We've got a little patch covered in trees (where the building will go)," Ms Bridgfoot said. "So it will be sad to lose those trees but we do have landscaping plans for the green space out the front of the original gallery building.
"The last expansion was in 2014 and was always imagined in stages. Everything is always funding contingent. This is phase 2+ of the last expansion.
"We have already outgrown our facility again. You only need to come here and see (the Elvis) exhibition to see it takes up the whole gallery.
"There are only the three historic courts on display, so that means there is more than 5000 objects in our storeroom that no one is seeing."
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