JYLL BRADLEY / HAY WARD GALLERY / MAY 2022 – APRIL 2023
T HE HOP
Structures for Growth By Debbie Meniru, curator of The Hop
Jyll Bradley’s epic outdoor installation The Hop is inspired by the local story of working‑class Londoners escaping the pollution of the city for a ‘working holiday’ harvesting hops in rural England. This adventurous and engaging ‘hop garden turned sculpture’ appeals to visitors with its inspired architectural forms and its remarkable play with light and colour. At once bold and allusive its appearance is constantly shifting, challenging our perceptual habits. Since opening in May 2022 The Hop has created an exciting and welcoming environment on the Gallery’s western terrace, hosting an array of spontaneous and curated events from dance to poetry to fashion parades. A year on, it is time to celebrate the life of The Hop as we bid the work farewell. Ralph Rugof, Director at the Hayward Gallery
I sat with Jyll Bradley in a temporary intervention made permanent: the roof garden of the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London. Bees and wasps and other pollinators buzzed in the air. Ants made paths of my skin. The garden was thriving and blooming, transforming the grey concrete slabs of brutalist architecture that dominate the south bank of the River Thames. Meanwhile, hidden by trees but only a few dozen feet away, Bradley’s own temporary intervention The Hop also grew softly in the afternoon light: colourful shadows crept up the walls and new patterns were cast by a sun fading into autumn. The concept of growth is deeply embedded within the conceptual framework of Bradley’s art. Open-air pavilion as much as sculpture, The Hop evokes the geometries of a Kentish hop garden, where vines grow on a web of strings arranged to expose the crop to the maximum amount of sunlight and encourage its abundant growth. Bradley has reimagined this agricultural technology for an urban location, evoking hop plants and their supports through wood and coloured Plexiglas. She sees her structures as anthropomorphic, recalling a chorus of women with their arms stretched up and out to embrace the sky, hands just touching. It was mostly women and children who, for over a century, travelled from smoggy London down to the countryside in Kent to bring in the hop harvest. Year on year, families returned to the same farms, forming a sense of community with other Londoners in the comparatively fresh air of rural England. Bradley’s work is deliberately designed to create spaces for communities to come together and for shared experiences with strangers. It is the meeting of Bradley’s work with an audience that imbues it with meaning. She makes spaces for creative and spiritual growth, spaces that both contain and open up to the sky, that are generous and secure. I’ve loved watching how children interact with The Hop, like a playground full of obstacles and opportunities. An environment that makes almost every child spontaneously start running, as if the only way to experience
it is at speed. The Hop gives purpose even to the gaps and passageways that it creates but does not occupy. Back in the verdant roof garden punctuated by potted trees, Bradley spoke to me about her interest in Stonehenge and other neolithic stone structures. Like The Hop, stone circles have been seen to resemble people: often women who were turned to stone, frozen in time. Bradley draws connections between these monuments and the hop gardens and other agricultural technologies of her childhood in rural England. Both have acted as sites of ritual gathering for people whose lives and livelihoods are dependent on the unpredictable British weather. It struck me how monuments such as Stonehenge don’t grow physically but instead they continuously shift, change and grow in meaning according to the context of the times. While Bradley’s sculptures have often been temporary visitors to sites around the UK and further afield, her work Green/Light (For M.R.) has been rooted in Folkestone on the south coast of the UK for eight years. What does it mean for a temporary intervention to become permanent architecture, to fuse with a place and seep into its identity? In playing with our understanding of place, Bradley is drawing and expanding upon the ideas of the Light and Space movement, a loose group of artists working primarily in Southern California in the 1960s. Their art prioritised ‘experience’ over ‘meaning’ and they often experimented with newly available materials such as acrylic and fibreglass to alter the perception of space and light. Our experience of light has also preoccupied Bradley for decades, from making watercolour paintings of her childhood greenhouse to using advertising lightboxes for works exhibited as part of the British Art Show at the Hayward Gallery in 1990. One artist associated with Light and Space art, Larry Bell, has been particularly influential for Bradley. Bell was fascinated by the interaction
between glass and light: ‘It reflected light; it transmitted light; it absorbed light – all at the same time’.¹ Edge-lit Plexiglas, Bradley’s medium of choice, shapes and handles light with a similar sleight of hand. Ostensibly, The Hop uses just two striking colours of Plexiglas: a deep midnight blue and a vivid fluorescent green. But the acrylic material is playful, shifting our perceptions of colour through its reflection, transmission and absorption of light. Even on the gloomiest of days, it seems to gather together the few rays of available light and push it out to its edges, creating bright zips of yellow and green. From another angle, the pavilion closes itself off protectively, blues appearing as almost-solid blacks. And, best of all, at dawn and dusk, the green becomes a permeable wall of translucent haze that can’t quite settle between sculpture and landscape. As the roof garden turned from green to brown with the arrival of winter, The Hop also responded to the change in seasons, becoming brightly lit by artificial lights as the nights drew in. Although rooted in rural architecture, Bradley’s sculpture is in close dialogue with its urban context. In London, our labour patterns are no longer connected to the cycles and movements of the Earth and so The Hop has also adapted to a new relationship with the seasons. Lit for winter, The Hop allowed us to extend the joy of summer sun into the winter festivities. The Hop can be experienced in many ways: alone or together; through dance or music; purposeful visit or chance encounter. My favourite way is to walk slowly through the gaps and passageways. I pay attention to the light and how it enlivens these structures for growth that we as humans make, that nature has always made and that together we will continue to make for time to come. ¹ Mia Locks/Christopher Lew (eds.), Whitney Biennial 2017, exhibition catalogue (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2017), p.84.
Images: Top left, Hop-picking, Golford Place Farm, Kent, 1950, PA Images, Alamy; Top right, Michaela Cisarikova Dance Company, photographer Taylor Rooke / Nonsensical; All other images, photographer Thierry Bal.
IN MEMORY OF HOPPING THIS CAPTURES THE MEMORIES THAT MADE EVERY YEAR A GOOD YEAR GOOD COMPANY, GOOD FRIENDSHIP, GOOD BEER IF THOSE FROM THE 50s AND 60s STOOD HERE THEY’D BE PROUD, THE WAY THE COLOURS COMPLIMENT THE SUNSHINE AND ACTS AS A SILVER LINING UNDER THE CLOUDS THIS IS LIKE THE BREATH OF FRESH AIR THEY HAD TO TRAVEL TO BACK WHEN THEY’D BATTLE THROUGH POLLUTION AS THICK AS TENSION NOT TO MENTION BACK WHEN BIRDS WOULD COUGH MORE THAN SING HOPPING WASN’T JUST A THING CHILDREN DID AS A WORKING HOLIDAY IT PUT THE FUN IN FUNDS AND REVIVED THE INNER CHILD, THE HOP IS AN ‘E’ SHORT OF WHAT IT FILLED THEM WITH BUT JYLL BRADLEY AND THE TEAM PROVED MEMORIES DO LIVE ON THAT’S THE FEELING THIS GREEN AND BLUE EDGE LIT PLEXI GIVES THE V SHAPE A METAPHOR FOR COMMUNITY WE’LL STAY CONNECTED EVEN IF WE MUST GROW APART NO MATTER WHAT, WE’LL KEEP MEMORIES THAT SHAPED US CLOSE TO HEART. ABSTRACT BENNA, 2022
The Hop by Jyll Bradley, 2022 was realised with the generous support of the Hayward Gallery Commissioning Committee and significant additional support from David Maclean. Publication design by Charlotte Hoyes generously funded by David Maclean.