Jyll Bradley » jyllbradley

For Untitled, Miami Beach Jyll Bradley created ‘Within a Budding Grove’ her first solo presentation of work in the U.S. The installation was subsequently awarded Best Booth at the fair, judged by Stephanie Seidel, Curator, ICA Miami.

Bradley’s installation evoked her teenage bedroom and included photographs, sculptures and a bespoke wallpaper work which created a sense of space and place. Titled after the second volume of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, ‘Within a Budding Grove’ recalled the increasing sense of self-awareness of Proust’s protagonist during his adolescence. Bradley took us on her own journey of self-discovery through the act of looking back and unearthing previously unseen photographic work from her archive.

Bradley’s 30-year career examines notions of identity, urbanity, light, nature, queerness and community through a minimalist aesthetic. A series of large-scale self-portrait photographs, taken in her bedroom when Bradley was a student in London in the 1980s and now printed at the artist’s height, were presented alongside works from the Graft and Scions series of wall-based sculptures. The dimensions of the Graft sculptures also reflect the height of the artist, forming a further representation of Bradley. ‘Within a Budding Grove’ explored ‘queering minimalism’, a term Bradley uses to describe how abstraction and minimalism can embody coded personal narratives and experiences.

Bradley’s wallpaper work was created from her complex hand-drawn patterns that reference the hop gardens of her childhood landscape. These traced a personal map across the wall with the flashes of yellow representing the fractured sun as it illuminated her room. Hung upon this wallpaper, Bradley’s photographic self-portraits examined what it was to be a young queer female, balancing the need to be seen with the instinct to hide away. Smaller self-portraits saw her play with the scale of her work exploring how memory shapes the way in which we view our experiences as we seek to recall the past.

The formal structures of her Graft sculptures (2023) reflect the agricultural landscape experienced by the artist around her childhood home of Kent, which was peppered with hop gardens. Created using Bradley’s signature materials of timber and colourful plexiglass, the Grafts can also be seen to echo the line of her spine, mirroring her own height. The play of light that Bradley witnessed as it was filtered through the glass greenhouse of the familial garden inspired her to experiment with light as a medium in her practice. The use of fluorescent live edge plexiglass in her sculptures allows light to activate her work, the viewer experiencing it anew as they move around the piece.

Bradley also introduced poetry to her sculptural forms for the first time through Scions. This series reflects on her personal archive and literary voice. Combing through early sketchpads, Bradley rediscovered lines of her poetry which she etched into the plexiglass, projecting the words out onto the viewer’s environment.

Within a Budding Grove raised questions about how we curate our personal archives and how we approach memories with new understanding brought on by the passing of time.

I am thrilled to have won Best Booth with Pi Artworks at Untitled Miami. The Booth was judged by Stephanie Seidel, Curator, ICA, Miami.

Image from left: Clara Andrade Pereira, Executive Director, Untitled; Stephanie Seidel, ICA Miami; myself; Jade Turanli, Director, Pi Artworks.

August 2023

I was delighted to be in conversation with Frieze Sculpture curator Fatoş Üstek and fellow artists Temitayo Ogunbiyi and Holly Stevenson about our works on show in The Regent’s Park and the idea of performance in sculpture.

www.frieze.com

Coloured ‘tracedown’ carbon paper hot-mounted onto painted beech plywood board.

In Umbrella Work (2023), a suite of new drawings on coloured carbon paper based on the mesmerising geometry of the hop gardens of Bradley’s childhood landscape. Bradley sees the process of making these works as a form of meditation in which she painstakingly repeats complex linear patterns across blue carbon paper, thus transferring them onto the painted board beneath. The carbon paper is then fixed and hot mounted to the board. These intricate works have the character of an architectural blueprint or a personal DNA, the patterns of life that shape and form us.

‘Jyll Bradley’s exhibition at Pi Artworks is a pitch-perfect triumph. You might think of it all as self-portraiture, as literal self-reflection. The materials, the scale and the body negotiating its space.’

Within a Budding Grove takes its title from the second volume of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, which follows the protagonist’s adolescence and his increasing sense of self-awareness. As a teenager, Jyll Bradley spent a lot of time sitting in her family’s greenhouse in rural Kent observing the play between sunlight and glass, a visual language that has remained integral to her work since the 1980s. This exhibition of works across sculpture, photography, film and drawing reflects central themes in Bradley’s work: identity, light and place through a process she describes as ‘queering minimalism.’

Recent, light-reactive sculptures titled Grafts, using her signature fluorescent edge lit Plexiglas titled Grafts (2023) – which share the dimensions of Bradley’s height and which she sees as self-portraits – hang beside hitherto unseen photographic self-portraits taken in the late 1980’s. These highly personal images hint at her desire as a young queer woman to be seen and understood but also to hide away, obscuring her face from the camera and turning to abstraction in her art as a way to express the strange and unexpected.

In Umbrella Work (2023), a series of new drawings based on the mesmerising geometry of the hop gardens of Bradley’s childhood landscape she repeats complex linear patterns across blue carbon paper. These intricate works have the character of an architectural blueprint or a personal DNA, the patterns of life that shape and form us.

The exhibition also includes Bradley’s first film Brigitte (2017). Here, through the passage of the sun and time-lapse photography she captures a ‘day in the life’ of one of her public sculptures on its wall-mounted home beside a railway line in Folkestone, Kent.

After a highly successful year at the Hayward Gallery, Bradley is bringing the spirit of her acclaimed work, The Hop to Frieze Sculpture. For this, she is transforming a section of The Regent’s Park into The Hop Square, evoking the themes and vivacity of the work – as both sculpture and place – as a catalyst for exciting performance and activation.

Bradley’s programme draws upon creative relationships developed in response to The Hop whilst at the Hayward. These include Spoken Word Poetry by Abstract Benna, Poet Laureate of Lambeth and Hopping, a dance work by MCDC set to original music score by Sound Artist Emily Peasgood.

To celebrate the re-homing of The Hop sculpture to Poplar, East London in 2024, a special dance commission will be premiered at the closing day of The Hop Square and Frieze Sculpture on 29 October. This collaboration – devised with leading choreographer Adesola Akinleye – is between Spotlight, an award-winning Creative Youth Hub based in Poplar, and their dance partners – One Youth Dance, IMD Legion and Blink Dance Theatre.

Frieze Sculpture curator Fatoş Üstek talks to artists Jyll Bradley, Temitayo Ogunbiyi and Holly Stevenson about their works on show in The Regent’s Park and the idea of performance in sculpture.

This new film by Will Martin, scripted and narrated by myself celebrates the year long life of The Hop, my Hayward Gallery Commission. The film explores my thoughts about sculpture as a gathering place and shows the many and various creative activations that arose through the work.

Platform A Gallery, Middlesborough Railway Station

28 September to 9 November

I’m delighted to be exhibiting in this group show curated by Eric Butcher. Artists include Morrissey and Hancock, David Batchelor, Rana Begum, Andy Harper, Eleanor Wood.

www.platformgallery.net

Curated by Jyll Bradley

Presented by Pi Artworks

Frieze Sculpture, London

19 September to 29 October

www.frieze.com