Jyll Bradley’s work encompasses a wide range of media, from drawing and photographic light boxes to writing, radio and large-scale public-art projects. At the core of her practice is a concern with identity politics, and an approach to identity that sees it as fluid rather than fixed. This is demonstrated through the artist’s interest in pairs and multiples, as manifested by coupled light boxes, suites of drawings and new works that unite photographic images and three-dimensional form. Bradley is also concerned with place, and in particular green places like gardens, which for her express shifting relationships and desires.
Over the last ten years, this interest in the idea of ‘place’ has resulted in significant public-art projects in both the UK and overseas, such as City of Trees, which was commissioned to help mark the 2013 centenary of Australia’s capital, Canberra. Each of these process-led explorations are shaped through the building of strong relationships with local people, with participants taking an active role in the making and meaning of the final works, as well as the way in which they are experienced.
Bradley’s practice reflects her long engagement with aspects of minimalism and has its origin in the late 1980s when, after leaving Goldsmiths, she pioneered the use of commercial light boxes in the UK, subverting their role as vehicles for advertising by turning them into enigmatic image/text works that reflect upon difference and choice. After this point, two important themes emerged: the artist’s engagement with literature and writing, and an interest in both the conceptual and formal potential of light. Throughout her work Bradley treats light both as metaphor and protagonist. Whether bringing to light a neglected text in a work for radio, drawing with light from a photocopier, or staging a ‘festival of light’ for 5,000 people on a wintry Glasgow lawn, light for Bradley represents a quiet insistence on being seen and heard, as well as a means of people coming together.
