Slip Stream by Rebecca Bradley

microGALLERY Project 4

MTU Gallery at 46 Grand Parade

3-30 September 2021

A publication about Rebecca Bradley’s current practice with an essay Edge Lands by Sarah Kelleher will be launched for Culture Night.

The audience of the microGALLERY are kept at a remove by a pane of glass, a pre-requisite of viewing that has become ever more normal as we negotiate the world through face visors and communicate through hastily rigged up protective screens. The gallery provides a small self- contained space that precludes the haptic encounter with the work on display; no smell of thinners and linseed, no close up inspections of vascular nodules of paint. The audience is like Benjamin’s Flaneur looking in the window as “the city splits for him into its dialectical poles. It opens up to him as a landscape, even as it closes around him as a room” ¹

Rebecca Bradley’s new site-responsive work at the Gallery Grand Parade is open to view through the window adjacent to the river. Consisting of paintings on loose canvases and found grounds this work contemplates this specific location at a busy pedestrian intersection where natural and manmade interventions meet in the context of  the many edge locations around Cork City where urban development and nature meet and contest their ground.

1 Benjamin, W. 1999a. The arcades project. H. Eiland & K McGlaughlin (Trans.). Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

Rebecca Bradley employs paint and everyday found materials to explore ideas about our encounters with landscape and memory. For her exhibition, Slip Stream she presents time-based installations, in a variety of mediums and iterations that blur the boundary between painting and sculpture.  Her installations contemplate landscape as a construct based on interactions between unstable natural and man-made elements, processes, and perceptions. Throughout September, Bradley assembles a procession of site-responsive installations that reflect on the effects of erosion, accumulation, growth, flooding and recycling using paint, found materials and a spirit of experimentation.

Artist Statement

Bradley’s practice occurs through play and process, memory and direct observation and a belief in paint as a medium that can communicate through representation, suggestion, ambiguity and it’s very visceral presence. Her research reflects on painting’s place as an intermediary for broader concerns about the environment and subjective perception. Recent work explores protest banners as a format for painting and old photographs as triggers of fickle memories that are re defined with paint.

Rebecca Bradley CV 2021

http://www.rebeccabradleyartist.com

info@rebeccabradleyartist.com

Instagram: @memorygram

Born in London, I have lived, worked and studied in Ireland for the past 29 years. I hold an MA (Art and process) and BA in Fine Art (painting) from MTU Crawford College of Art. In 2019 I was selected for the International painting residency symposium at the Mark Rothko Art Centre in Latvia. My work is held in public and private collections in France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Switzerland, UK and USA. Recent acquisitions of my work have been made by the OPW State Art Collection and the Mark Rothko Art Centre, Daugavpils. I am a board member of Sample-Studios. I was awarded the Arts Council Agility Award in 2021.

Education

2012-13: Masters fine art and process, CIT Crawford College Art and Design, Cork

2003-2007: BA (Hons) Fine Art Painting, CIT Crawford College Art and Design, Cork

1994:     Hdip Co-op Organisation, Food Marketing, and Rural Development, University College Cork

1988-91: BSC (Hons) Sociology, Kingston University, Surrey

Solo Exhibitions:

2021:     MTU Gallery, Cork, Slip Stream.

2020:     Seamus Ennis Arts Centre, Naul, Open To Art, On-line exhibition.

2017: Stern View Gallery, Cork, The More You See the Less You Hold. A new publication Still There and Ready, (in collaboration with Sarah Hayden) was released to coincide with this exhibition and was selected by Oonagh Young for the 2017 Dublin Art Book Fair in Temple Bar gallery.

2016: Seamus Ennis Arts Centre, Naul, Vestiges of Place, selected solo show.

2015: Stern View Gallery, Cork: Provisional View an invited solo show at Sternview Gallery as part of music and arts Festival Sounds from A Safe Harbour.

2013: Parade, Margate, UK, Situate, gallery-based residency and exhibition.

2010: Enniskillen Visual Arts Festival, Installation of 30 paintings of postcard dimensions.

2009: Doswell Gallery, Rosscarberry, Co. Cork, Soft Days.

Selected Group Exhibitions and talks:

2021:    September: Breaking Cover Performance, Irish Museum Modern Art.

2021:    July: West Cork Arts Centre, Evanescent

2021:    June: West Cork Arts Centre, Standstill

2020:    December:  Sternview Gallery, Cork , Annual 3.

2020:    December: Lavit Gallery, Cork, Christmas Exhibition

2020:    December: The Lord Mayor’s Pavilion, Sample-Studios Members Show

2020:    September:  Sternview gallery, Cork, Memory Edits curated by Pádraig Spillane.

2020:    August-October:  Lismore Castle Arts, Waterford, Stories From Lismore and Beyond curated by Paul McAree.

2020:    July: Thissio, Athens, Athens Art Open.

2020:    January: Latvian National Library, Riga, Group Exhibition curated by The Mark Rothko Art Centre.

2019:    December: This is a Painting Show, Sternview Gallery, Cork.

2019:   Oct-November: Exhibition, residency/symposium at The Mark Rothko Art Centre, Daugavpils, Latvia.

2019:    July: Lewisham Art House, London, We each have our own landscape.

2019:    May: Thompson House, Cork, Design Pop.

2018:    November: Lavit Gallery, Cork, Small works

2018:    August: Municipal Art Gallery of Piraeus, Athens

2108:    July: Misc Arts, Timisoara, Romania,

2018:    June: Gonzo Unit, Thresholds, Thessaloniki, Greece

2018:    May:  Art number 23, The Old Biscuit Factory, London.

2017:    Wandesford Quay Gallery, Cork, Meanwhile.

2016:   Visual, Carlow, Art works; selected by Annie Fletcher and Claire Feeley as part of Carlow arts festival

2016:    Walcot Chapel, Bath, UK, Utopia Dystopia; as part of Fringe Arts Bath

2015:   CIT Crawford School of art, invited speaker, and exhibitor at There’s a ghost in my house 2, symposium, and exhibition.

2014:    Doswell Gallery, Rosscarberry, Ireland, Exposure

2014:    Tactic Gallery, Cork, Sulumuc

2013:    Doswell Gallery Selected group exhibition

2012:    Cork School of Architecture MA art & process degree show Outbox

2012:    Wandesford Quay Gallery, Cork, (un)doing, Engagements with process

2011:    Elysian, Cork; Art Embassy, as part of Cork Art Trail

2011:    Doswell Gallery, Rosscarberry, Ireland, Land and sea

2011:    Sirius Arts Centre, Cobh, Land and Sea, A group of 4 selected landscape artists.

2010:    Miami SCOPE Art Fair Selected.

2010:    Ballymaloe Grain Store, Cork, Harvest, an exhibition of 7 women Artists

2010:    Affordable art fair, Battersea Park, London represented by St.art gallery

2010:    Mill Cove Gallery, Castletownberre, Awards Show selected for the New Year Show

2009:    St.art Gallery, Twickenham, U.K., Collection 1

2008:    Gallerie Nautique, Cork, Group Show

2007:    CIT Crawford College of Art, Cork, Degree Show 2007

Reviews and essays

“For all the urgency of her subject matter and approach,  this is not anxious or melancholic work, but is expressive of enormous, questioning energy and determination. These paintings could be banners or flags, radiant in their stained, saturated materiality.”

Sarah Kelleher,  2021, Edge Lands, An essay as part of publication to accompany this new body of work.

“Where Bradley’s work often incorporates not alone a highly worked, ridged surface, but even rubble, charcoal and earth so that the canvas projects physically into the space of the gallery, the Illegible Frontiers paintings are unusually sheer. What material thickness they have is all birch backing. In places, the pigment seems barely there at all. More stain than slick. Intently insubstantial. And yet, through evanescent oil and varnish washes, the grain of the wood asserts itself—insists upon the primacy of what prevails directly beneath. Image and support cleave from each other, stirringly. The effect is vibratory. “

Dr. Sarah Hayden, 2017,  Still There         and ready, publication and spoken word essay from collaboration on Illegible Frontiers body of work, pg.6.

‘Rebecca Bradley integrates paintings with large scale installation work and utilises found objects scavenged from defunct sites. Her work is a way of recording a history of events, but far from being a depressing representation of decline it is imbued with a sense of excitement for the possibility of change and the expectation of what may lie around the next corner.’

Review of Meanwhile, by Judy Fisher in The Thin Air, 2017

‘Hers is no Romantic sensibility of unchanging, eternal natural spectacle. As well as commemorating the work of remembering, the operations she carries out on the field of the painting (some of which are gentle, coaxing, others of which represent much more aggressive interventions onto the canvas) invoke the acts of reshaping and re-making to which the landscape— a construct framed from its inception by and through a human perspective— is and always has been subject.’ ‘These are paintings that deserve to be viewed close-up and sidelong, so that we are reminded why it is that people still do and should and need to paint. ’ Dr. Sarah Hayden, excerpts from talk delivered on the occasion of the opening of Provisional View Exhibition, September 9th 2015

She uses found materials such as foxed paper and faded postcards to make quietly restrained paintings of gentle decay. The results at first seem muted and spare, almost minimal, but also present an absorbing investigation into the transitions between two and three dimensional spaces, using shallow relief, recession and torn, frayed layers.’

Sarah Kelleher review of Rebecca’s work in Outbox, Paper Visual Art Journal, 2013

‘Outstanding textural paintings based on landscape’

Aidan Dunne, chief art critic of the Irish Times, Review of Rebecca’s June 2007