Within a Budding Grove (Memory Room)
Exhibiting in East of the Aldgate Pump
Whitechapel Gallery, London
14 July to 6 September
Jyll Bradley’s installation Within a Budding Grove (Memory Room) forms part of the Whitechapel Gallery’s 125th anniversary exhibition. Within a Budding Grove (Memory Room) juxtaposes photographic self-portraits taken in the late 1980’s with recent sculptures, which, reflecting the artist’s height are also a form of self-portrait.
Bradley took the self-portraits almost 40 years ago but did not show them at the time. Brought to light from her archive, the photographs express a desire to try out identities, looks, personae and costumes exploring androgyny and queerness. In some, Bradley is dressed as Orlando the shape-shifting, time-travelling character from Virginia Woolf’s eponymous novel. These images – held between playfulness and vulnerability – convey both a desire to be seen and a desire for privacy with the artist turning her back on the viewer. Some of the images are framed with Bradley’s signature fluorescent Plexiglass – a material she uses for her recent large-scale installations. The artist refers to this as ‘framing the past with my present’.
The photographs were taken in Bradley’s bedroom in Kent, south east England. The artist evokes this immersive space through the creation of a wallpaper whose pattern derives from the hop field geometry from the artist’s childhood landscape. This wallpaper draws together this work which as a whole expresses feelings of belonging and identity, both representational and abstract.
whitechapelgallery.org/exhibitions/east-of-the-aldgate-pump/