Untitled, Miami, Solo Booth with Pi Artworks, (2024)
4-8 December, 2024
Winner, Best Booth
For Untitled, Miami Beach Jyll Bradley created ‘Within a Budding Grove’ her first solo presentation of work in the U.S. The installation was subsequently awarded Best Booth at the fair, judged by Stephanie Seidel, Curator, ICA Miami.
Bradley’s installation evoked her teenage bedroom and included photographs, sculptures and a bespoke wallpaper work which created a sense of space and place. Titled after the second volume of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, ‘Within a Budding Grove’ recalled the increasing sense of self-awareness of Proust’s protagonist during his adolescence. Bradley took us on her own journey of self-discovery through the act of looking back and unearthing previously unseen photographic work from her archive.
Bradley’s 30-year career examines notions of identity, urbanity, light, nature, queerness and community through a minimalist aesthetic. A series of large-scale self-portrait photographs, taken in her bedroom when Bradley was a student in London in the 1980s and now printed at the artist’s height, were presented alongside works from the Graft and Scions series of wall-based sculptures. The dimensions of the Graft sculptures also reflect the height of the artist, forming a further representation of Bradley. ‘Within a Budding Grove’ explored ‘queering minimalism’, a term Bradley uses to describe how abstraction and minimalism can embody coded personal narratives and experiences.
Bradley’s wallpaper work was created from her complex hand-drawn patterns that reference the hop gardens of her childhood landscape. These traced a personal map across the wall with the flashes of yellow representing the fractured sun as it illuminated her room. Hung upon this wallpaper, Bradley’s photographic self-portraits examined what it was to be a young queer female, balancing the need to be seen with the instinct to hide away. Smaller self-portraits saw her play with the scale of her work exploring how memory shapes the way in which we view our experiences as we seek to recall the past.
The formal structures of her Graft sculptures (2023) reflect the agricultural landscape experienced by the artist around her childhood home of Kent, which was peppered with hop gardens. Created using Bradley’s signature materials of timber and colourful plexiglass, the Grafts can also be seen to echo the line of her spine, mirroring her own height. The play of light that Bradley witnessed as it was filtered through the glass greenhouse of the familial garden inspired her to experiment with light as a medium in her practice. The use of fluorescent live edge plexiglass in her sculptures allows light to activate her work, the viewer experiencing it anew as they move around the piece.
Bradley also introduced poetry to her sculptural forms for the first time through Scions. This series reflects on her personal archive and literary voice. Combing through early sketchpads, Bradley rediscovered lines of her poetry which she etched into the plexiglass, projecting the words out onto the viewer’s environment.
Within a Budding Grove raised questions about how we curate our personal archives and how we approach memories with new understanding brought on by the passing of time.
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