It’s well worth visiting The Box in Plymouth. You can see interesting local collections, the touring show from Hepworth Wakefield of surrealist landscapes, and a remarkably comprehensive and superbly orchestrated retrospective covering more than forty years of Jyll Bradley’s practice.
Bradley is best known for large outdoor installations through which colourful geometric structures interact with nature and light on a scale that enables people to engage with them as performative spaces as much as sculptures. In Plymouth ‘The Hop’, formerly seen outside the Hayward Gallery, is reconfigured outside the show entrance to resemble a sailing ship, nodding to the venue’s naval history. The construction, marked by Bradley’s signature use of fluorescent, edge-lit, coloured Plexiglas that catches sunlight, has a joyous energy and visual allure independent of any narrative. And it delivers on Bradley’s belief that ‘creating space for other people is one of the most political things you can do’. Yet the show as a whole enables us to see ‘The Hop’ not just as an expansion of minimalist principles into the architectural and social sphere, but also a symbolic representation of Bradley’s autobiographical themes. Fatoş Üstek’s contribution to a new monograph characterises this as ‘a unique position at the intersection of art, environment and experience’.
Bradley’s starting point can be taken as two types of vernacular construction with which she grew up in Kent: the greenhouse and the hop garden. Both are designed to afford protection to potentially vulnerable plants while maximising their available light; the nourishing, spiritual, and metaphorical roles of light are implicit in most of Bradley’s work. And both act as threshold architecture, having aspects of both the inside and outside simultaneously. That is captured in the photograph that opens the show: a young Bradley stands in the entrance to the greenhouse of her childhood home. Is she inside or outside? The question proves relevant, as she faced comparable questions of self-definition. She was adopted under the ‘closed system’ of the 1960’s, when it was by no means easy to identify one’s birth parents; she had a rural upbringing, then moved to the city; and she was queer at a time when the templates for that orientation were less accessible than now.
It is probably simplest to consider Bradley’s themes through the various media used. She came to public attention from the late 80’s onwards as the first British artist to use light boxes to present photographs. That gives them a sculptural presence and enables her to contrast personal and intimate meanings with their usual use as an advertising medium. They often incorporate text, for example ‘Urban Cowboys’, 1991, explores the conundrums of choice in the context of establishing one’s sexual identity by using the words of Proust. A later example is ‘The Bridge’, a heartfelt tribute to YBA Angus Fairhurst (1966-2008), who was Bradley’s neighbour. This inscription features a letter from Bradley to Fairhurst’s mother, a memory of him, over the view they shared of the Thames. The prominence of coloured lights presages the sculptural use of translucent volumes.
Bradley took a break from visual art in the mid-90s, turning to performance and writing for BBC radio. That experience informs two films – a trilogy is planned – that convey their sense through sound, much like a radio play. What we see contributes metaphor and resonance rather than narrative content. ‘M.R.’, 2021, tells of Bradley’s search for her birth mother – initials MR – with the visuals provided by the ‘hop garden’ sculpture ‘Green/Light for M.R.’ as it shifts through weathers, hours and seasons. That work, commissioned for Folkestone Triennial – the town where Bradley was born – saw her stake out her presence through 44 hop poles strung together on a post-industrial plot in the centre of the town where it stood from 2014-23. Bradley talks of ‘using the sculpture as a giant camera – both into the past and reflecting the world around it’. The key detail leading to identifying her birth mother was a congenital eye condition, tying in to the importance of sight to a would-be artist. Bradley’s journeys of self-discovery can be seen in her transition to an artistic vocation.
Jyll Bradley: still from ‘The Meeting’, 2025 – Film, 17 mins
‘The Meeting’, 2025, recounts the story of Bradley’s first meeting with M.R., together with images of the Palm House at Kew Gardens. That, a more elaborate greenhouse, combines structure with nature, and chimes with the encounter’s potential for growth, not to mention being where the meeting actually took place. Writing, photography, light and sculpture come together in these films, which carry forward the theme of choices and their limitations. In Bradley’s words: ‘I had these twin psychic poles of feeling special and chosen by a new family, and of complete abandonment. There is a speculative gap of who you might be or who you might have been in another life.’ The adoptee is, you might say, both inside and outside of two separate lives.
There isn’t a new public sculpture in Plymouth, but there is a large new installation, the titular ‘Running and Returning’. It utilises dichroic film and metalwork to take the language derived from hop gardens and greenhouses in a new direction that could potentially inform future public sculpture. There are also smaller wall-based works, titled ‘Graft’ by reference to both horticulture and labour. ‘It takes a lot of hard work’, says Bradley, ‘to bring those materialities together – the hop pole and the plexi – like it does to reconcile different aspects of the self’. The ‘Graft’ series presents her distinctive architectural-minimalist language at her own height, so proposing them as self-portraits of a sort. Gemma Rolls-Bentley’s monograph essay positions Bradley as ‘queering minimalism’ by ‘repurposing non-representational structures through which she creates space for herself on her own terms’. More radically, she sees the vertical strips as glowing ‘with a reflective light that appears to emit from a magical slit deep within’, going so far as to say that they are ‘giving neon cunt’.
The exhibition pairs those recent abstracted self-portraits with images from Bradley’s student days at Goldsmiths, also printed to match her height. She took them in her bedroom in the late 80’s, but has only just shown them publicly. That makes them the most explicit example of the titular ‘running and returning’, which Bradley glosses as ‘coming back to a moment in time, evaluating it and bringing that experience to the present’. We see her on the one hand seeking to be seen – she took the photographs, after all – but on the other hand turning away. In some, she plays the role of Virginia Woolf’s time-travelling, sex-changing character Orlando. Making the portraits, dated ‘1987-2023’, new as well as ol,d speaks to an ongoing redefinition of the self, respecting the past and reflecting on it from the present perspective.
Jyll Bradley: installation view with self-portraits as Orlando
There is also plenty I haven’t mentioned: drawings and paintings that employ the hop garden language differently again; a film that applies it to music by Steve Reich; communally-grounded photographic projects; an installation across the back of the Box’s café area; vitrines showcasing Bradley’s choices from and adoptive family connections with the local historical archives. All of it fits into the primary theme of self-discovery in the greenhouse/hop garden context, where being inside and outside at the same time is explored. Light-maximising structures exemplify this as a metaphor for seeking the illumination needed for personal growth. It makes for a powerfully unified exploration of the politics of the self.
Top Photo: Jyll Bradley: ‘The Hop’, 2022, as installed at The Box – photo Dom Moore