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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