Power of What (Memory Room), Pi Artworks, London, 2026
Pi Artworks, London, UK
6 October-5 November 2026
Artist Statement by Jyll Bradley:
Power Of What (Memory Room) reflects upon young adulthood as a time of transition and creative origins. This intimate installation explores memory and identity through newly revealed self-portrait photography from my 35- years old archive, juxtaposed with recent sculptures, watercolours and a new wallpaper work.
Power of What (Memory Room) draws upon the space of my first studio which was the dilapidated, minimal greenhouse in our garden. The structure provided a place for creative growth whilst representing a feeling of ‘being at once inside and outside’, symbolising my feeling as a young, queer artist in the 1980s of being seen, yet being outside. The self-portraits at the core of the exhibition show the tenderness, curiosity and uncertainty of early queer teenage and adulthood. I’m wearing my prized men’s brogues; I’m framing myself in the greenhouse doorway, androgynous, turning away. Yet present.
For the first time, I am also showing watercolours and drawings I made as a teenager in the 1980’s. Shown in dialogue with other works, these give insight into the formal and conceptual origins of the sculptural language running through my large scale works such as The Hop, 2022-23, Hayward Gallery, as well as showing my early experiments with light and translucent material.
There’s a celebratory quality to Power of What (Memory Room). For the first time I’m using dichroic material that, through the action of light, casts a spectrum of rainbow colours. This is seen in a new family of photographic prints, a wallpaper – made from a blown-up photograph taken of light shining through one of my sculptures – and a major new sculpture Running and Returning. Central to the show and made from simple garden cloches (miniature greenhouses) this work changes in appearance as you move round it and signifies a sense of my life coming full circle. A rainbow covenant between my past young self and present adulthood.
This exhibition reflects a personal yearning to dig into transparency, climb inside light, embody the greenhouse, rainbow and all its colours. I want to touch that which is immaterial, to capture feeling with physicality. This strange space that the greenhouse offered me – a liminal place of transparency, light – what was so powerful and personally affecting all those years ago. What was it about something so esoteric? That, to me, is the Power of What.