Since the early days of Bradley’s practice, when she combined image and text in a works made using commercial light boxes, an engagement with literature and producing her own writing have both played an important role in the artist’s output: essays often accompany her visual work, for example in Bradley’s artist’s book, Mr Roscoe’s Garden. And between 1998 and 2004, in a distinct body of work for BBC Radio 4, Bradley’s writing was widely praised for its innovation and playfulness with language, and the bringing to light of neglected texts and narratives concerning women’s lives and experience. Her here work included the first ever radio adaptation of Kate Chopin’s banned novel The Awakening marking the centenary of its publication and her original drama Filet de Sole Veronique which won the European Broadcasting Award for Best Script in 1998.
This artist’s book (Liverpool University Press, Liverpool, UK 2008) was produced as part of Bradley’s residency with the Liverpool Botanical Collection, and commissioned to mark Liverpool’s year as European Capital of Culture 2008. In this excerpt the artist reflects on the importance of her childhood garden to her reading of the people and gardens of Liverpool’s botanic story.
In this excerpt Bradley reflects on the forgotten story of Liverpool’s historic botanic gardens.
An essay that reflects on the process of making the wallpaper art work Lent Lily, which was created for the exhibition ‘Human Cargo’ at Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery, an exhibition that marked the 2007 bicentenary of the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade. This piece was published in Cargo: Excavating the Contemporary Legacy of the Transatlantic Slave Trade in Plymouth and Devon, edited by Len Pole and Zoe Shearman (Plymouth University Press, Plymouth, UK 2011).