Jyll Bradley
– an Overview
Jyll Bradley was born in 1966 in the English seaside town of Folkestone, UK and adopted soon after. Growing up in nearby Maidstone, Bradley spent much of her time in the beautiful garden at her home and its dilapidated greenhouse. From the age of 13 onwards, the greenhouse became a kind of studio for Bradley, who would make sculptures from bits that fell off the building. Bradley remembers hearing a quote from Sarah Lucas to the effect of: You make yourself out of a place with what you have. “I resonate with that. You don’t find yourself, you create yourself,” says Bradley.
Bradley took a trunk-load of these greenhouse assemblages with her to her interview at Goldsmiths College in London, where she studied from 1985–88. Her university experience was incredibly formative, both creatively and personally. At Goldsmiths, Bradley studied under female tutors such as Mary Kelly and Andrea Fisher. It was a time of Feminist thinking and Bradley became interested in psychoanalysis and ideas around identity. Having grown up as a queer woman in a suburban town, the bright lights of London were somewhat of an environmental and cultural shock. Bradley found herself drawn to the streets and urban light that were so different to the wide landscapes of the North Downs close to her home. She became fascinated with illuminated advertising and spent a lot of time exploring London’s bustling West End. “I was a flaneur creature, walking around at night photographing shop windows and the people who were out and about,” she says.
During the holidays, Bradley would come home and experiment with photography, dressing as alternative characters. She had a particular interest in the protagonist Orlando, from the eponymous novel written in 1928 by Virginia Woolf. The book describes the life of a poet who changes gender from a man to a woman and moves through the centuries, meeting key figures from English literary history. It is inspired by the bisexual writer Vita Sackville-West who was Woolf's lover and close friend. Bradley’s growing obsession with this character was twofold: it reflected her own explorations of gender and sexuality but was also caused by a striking resemblance between herself and Sackville-West. “Many people who are adopted go through life searching for people who look like them because we grow up in a family of people who don’t,” Bradley says.
In her work, Bradley began to experiment with lightboxes, which were used in street advertising, as an artistic medium and was one of the first artists if not the first in the UK to do so. She used the lightbox as a tool to explore identity in a less prescriptive, more poetic and personal way. Bradley was influenced by the Canadian artist Jeff Wall (b. 1946) who made his first backlit transparencies in 1978. At the time, in the late 1980s, society had begun debating the perils of advertising and its influence on peoples’ lives as well as the misogyny and sexism that regularly appeared in ads. For her degree show, Bradley displayed Tiresias (1988) her first lightbox installation, depicting queer couples out in the West End. Naming Spaces (1989) was included in the show Interim Jeune I at Maureen Paley’s Interim Art in London in 1989 and Urban Cowboys (1991) was part of British Art Show 3 at London’s Hayward Gallery in 1991.
Through these works, she developed her lightboxes towards installation, creating spaces using light structures, and became increasingly interested in Minimalism. “There were a number of us at the time who were queer or black or female, who were interested in the idea that Minimalism could be a kind of space for oneself. I think I've always been looking for a place for me. So I began working on creating space through minimalist objects that also insisted upon meaning,” Bradley says.
Bradley went on to study at the Slade School of Fine Art (1991–93). As someone who had always kept journals and for whom literature had been a big inspiration in her work, she
began writing more and more. She wrote texts for performances and theatre and from 1998 to 2004, she predominantly worked as a freelance writer for BBC Radio. Her award-winning work included writing original radio dramas, making documentaries and dramatising novels, all with a particular focus on women's lives and hidden stories. For example, she wrote Just Plain Gardening, an all-female comedy set in a fictitious girls gardening school, which was commissioned for two series for Woman's Hour in 2002. “The idea of the garden had stayed with me through childhood,” Bradley says. “And I was very interested in writing identity rather than writing about identity: poetic, naughty, quite mischievous,” she adds.
Bradley returned to the world of visual art in 2003, inspired once again by gardens. She created large group gatherings and performances, such as Fragrant, a contemporary flower festival in association with producer Bill Gee and Duckie, a group of LGBTQIA+ club runners in south London who also presented arts events. “The flower festival was quite innovative at the time. Nowadays you see how a lot of councils are reintroducing these traditionally English events as a way to bring people together. The festival in Vauxhall was one of the first of these kinds of events to evoke that idea,” Bradley says. The event was, in fact, partflower festival, part-club night for the queer community and held in a church. “It was really moving because it was a time when the church was still really antagonistic towards gay people. Lots of the gay men who attended had been choirboys and they found it very emotional to be back in a church where they were actually accepted. It was a transformative, camp and otherworldly event with thousands of flowers everywhere.”
In 2006-08, Bradley was an artist-in-residence at Liverpool City Botanical Collection where she created the Fragrant Liverpool project, commissioned by Liverpool Culture Company as part of the European Capital of Culture 2008. For this she produced a suite of five photographic lightboxes, much like her early works, showing panoramic images of a fantasy botanic garden. They were created in response to her research into Liverpool's once famed botanic gardens, which were founded by William Roscoe in 1803 and closed in the political turmoil of the 1980s . “For more than two centuries the collection was a wandering one, being rehoused in the city twice,” according to the National Museum Liverpool website. “When the gardens were finally shut in the 1980s, the plants were removed from public view and dispersed.” Bradley also wrote the artist’s book Mr Roscoe's Garden (2008) reflecting on this dispersed collection, one that is still mourned over by the local community today, and she worked with the city’s gardeners on a garden for the Chelsea Flower Show. This marked the first time in decades that Liverpool’s historic plant collection had been on display there.
While the garden remains a recurring motif in Bradley works, her experience of being adopted has informed her practice, resulting in a research-led interest in people and histories. “I have been quite driven to find out my own story, and this has given me the skills to help other people find their stories,” says Bradley. “So I think that with some of these projects such as the one in Liverpool where the story was scattered all through the city and there was all kinds of hurt and mistrust I am able to come from the outside and understand and help piece things together.” Bradley found her birth mother in her 20s but didn’t openly discuss being adopted until later in life and in her works such as M.R. (2021), a film that explores the subjects of childhood adoption, creativity and identity. (M.R. are the initials Bradley shares with her birth mother).
During her time in Liverpool, Bradley met Lewis Biggs, the then-chief executive and artistic director of the Liverpool Biennial. He went on to become the curator of the 2014 Folkestone Triennial and invited Bradley to return to her hometown to create her ambitious project Green/Light (for M.R.) (2014). The major sculptural light installation at the Old Gasworks site in Folkestone was a pivotal career moment and a point of intense personal growth. “It was ridiculously ambitious because I'd never made anything like that before,” says Bradley. “It brought together aspects of my work that I felt had been a bit disparate: the urban
materialities of my early work in London alongside the rural childhood landscapes and light.” Green/Light (for M.R.) was directly inspired by cultivation of hops, a crop that in England dates back to the end of the 15th century when it was probably introduced from Flanders to the Maidstone area, where Bradley grew up.
The structure of the work reflected many layers of personal meaning for Bradley who saw it as a self-portrait. “The outer square grid of the sculpture built as a traditional hop garden with wooden poles, wirework and stringing creates a webbed enclosure that represents her childhood in Kent,” according to the website of Creative Folkestone, which commissions the triennial. “The inner circle of aluminium poles that shimmer with colour and gather light occupies the precise footprint of one of the original gasometers on the site, and stands for the energy and insight of [Bradley’s] adult life.” The Old Gasworks had also been abandoned in the same year that Bradley was born. Bradley’s sculpture lit up, illuminating a part of town that had long been deemed unsafe at night. “The hop garden is all about light and how you can build a structure that can capture as much light as possible to help a plant grow to its maximum potential,” Bradley says, concluding the visual metaphor. Green/Light (for M.R.) was well loved by the community and stayed in place for nine years. Its glowing presence is seen as a catalyst for the Council’s eventual purchase and regeneration of The Old Gasworks site.
Bradley went on to make further sculptures in the likeness of Green/Light (for M.R.). These include Dutch/Light (2017) at the Historic Dockyard in Chatham and Turner Contemporary, Margate, which was commissioned to mark the 350th anniversary of the Dutch Raid on the River Medway that brought about the end of the Anglo-Dutch wars. Bradley began to realise that the public used her sculptures as places to gather and as inspiration for further acts of creation. Reflecting back to her early work in performance, the colourful Plexiglass and its resultant sun-dial like refractions became the setting for weddings, football masterclasses, dance commissions, and fashion shows. In turn, these inspired several of Bradley’s films that captured the living nature of her public works and led her to collaborations with other creatives such as leading U.S. based composer Anna Clyne.
In 2022, Bradley’s public sculpture commission The Hop (2022) opened at the Hayward Gallery, London. Designed as an interactive pavilion made of Plexiglass, aluminium and pine wood, the work further built on Bradley’s designs for Green/Light (for M.R.) but focused more on the stories of families who would bring in the hop harvest. From the mid-1800s until the 1960s, working class families would travel to Kent from East London in the late summer to cultivate the crop as a sort of working holiday, also known as ‘going hopping’. For around a year, Bradley’s hop-related sculptures stood in both of her homes: London and Kent. “I think there's something interesting about the way that I'm always making multiples of things,” says Bradley. “I never do one drawing or a monolithic sculpture, there's always a pair or a family of things that make up one work.”
In March 2023, Bradley joined the international contemporary art gallery Pi Artworks. In September of that year, the gallery presented a solo show of Bradley’s work titled Within A Budding Grove, curated by Debbie Meniru. The show included Plexiglass wall sculptures as well as new geometric works, inspired by the formation of hop gardens, drawn on blue carbon paper. Also on show for the first time were large-scale photographs that Bradley had taken of herself when she was a student. “Bradley’s photographic self-portraits hint at her desire as a queer woman in the 1980s 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,” writes Meniru.
Bradley also took part in Frieze Sculpture, London in October 2023. Inspired by The Hop at the Hayward Gallery, Bradley’s The Hop Square took over part of The Regent’s Park with
performances and activations including spoken word poetry from Lambeth’s Poet Laureate Abstract Benna. The Hop Square was the first standalone performance programme presented at Frieze Sculpture and expressed Bradley’s expanded vision of what sculpture is and can be: a space of performativity and collectivity.
Bradley continues to produce new work around the themes of identity, urbanity, light, cultivation, queerness and community. Intersectionality the place where multiples of these elements, and others, meet is what interests her most. Through her research-driven practice, Bradley ploughs the fertile creases of what it means to create, to grow, and to uncover our histories. “Everybody's intersectional, actually. We all have lots of different aspects that make up who we are,” Bradley says. “The magic lies in the spaces in between.”