Gill Hedley Naming Spaces, The Exchange Gallery, Penzance, Cornwall,
Art Monthly, May 2010
Art Monthly, May 2010
The exhibition begins with The Exchange 2010, a vinyl text, which, as the exhibition’s overall title suggests, serves to name the place (the gallery was previously a telephone exchange) and set a scene. We read a part of a letter from Proust who advises his unknown correspondent: ‘You would do well to keep them in suspense… after a moment’s hesitation give in a bit yourself.’
Throughout the exhibition, Bradley has made careful juxtapositions of lightboxes, rich in colour and image, and accompanying white panels. These devices introduce a minimalist aesthetic, and implication of the unwritten page, and a sculptural sense linking floor to wall where they lean quietly, their blank virginal sides displayed but giving no idea what, if anything is hidden behind.
The most recent work in the exhibition include ‘Wordpairs’, a small series of works which feature old photographs from the artist’s personal archive. Bradley has laid images on white surfaces as if about to create a book or a poster, complete with the graphic registration marks. The correlations are hidden from the viewer but in Wordpairs (2) and (3), 2010, a family story is implied. A fine-featured man from several generations ago looks out at us; in the companion piece a small girl in a 1970’s photo taken on a Cornish beach fixes her sights through binoculars out to sea. Now she trains her gaze on him across the years.
The earliest work in the exhibition has been remade for ‘Naming Spaces’ and gives the exhibition its title. First made in 1989, three young women, full of glee and charm, are captured in two images, blurred to add both imediacy and transience. Overlaid are two texts from Proust as a memory trigger.
Epithalamion: Song for Cornwall, 2010, is a hymn to marriage. The major threat to the local flower trade is the intensive farming methods of the Dutch industry, which buys up flowers from Kenya, Colombia and now Russia., and flies them round the world to be delivered to supermarkets and specialist florists everywhere, including Cornwall. These large images are canvas pigment prints pinned to the gallery wall, making reference to fabric banners that advertise or protest or identify. However, their rich painterly quality also recalls tour de force still-life paintings in which, of course, the Dutch once specialised. Drinks, snacks, wellies, Dutch flower buckets and a sign reading ‘We make Bouquets’ place the setting of Bradley’s works in the here and now, but a bravura representation of a tall glass vase in the scene acts like the mirror in van Eyck’s Arnolfini Wedding, though the artist in this case remains unseen.
The viewer stands in the middle of a 360 degree panorama of four lightboxes, the scene is an old flower barn on a farm near Penzance whose usage has now been revived by a local entrepreneur. Here, in the tableau in which wedding garlands are being fashioned, the florist has created a new project called The Cornish Flower Train, which is itself a marriage of marketing skills and the traditional flower farmer’s reticence. Bradley herself has made a work in acknowledgement called Flower Train a series of ten posters which will be displayed in railway stations on the line between Penzance and Paddington, marking the journey made by the legendary Flower Train which brought freshly picked flowers from Cornish fields overnight to Covent Garden. As befits a sequence that will be seen on a train line through spring, the images also succeed in their modest but powerful way to deal with time, light and seasons. Nine images are visible in the gallery from the street and the tenth, in an homage to Felix Gonzales Torres, is displayed as a large pile with an invitation for each visitor to help themselves, furl the poster and secure it with an elastic band, like the simple bunch of flowers. The last line of text on the giveaway is ‘the final choice was mine’, delivering the audience back to Proust.
This is an elegantly installed exhibition with clever variations of angles and corners, and combining intimate with more stage-like spaces. The lightboxes are seductive and the medium deliberately echoes advertising, glowing in an urban night scene. It is also a highly intelligent exhibition and a rare bird: one which brings the highly personal alongside the genuinely public projects and from which each gains substantially.
Throughout the exhibition, Bradley has made careful juxtapositions of lightboxes, rich in colour and image, and accompanying white panels. These devices introduce a minimalist aesthetic, and implication of the unwritten page, and a sculptural sense linking floor to wall where they lean quietly, their blank virginal sides displayed but giving no idea what, if anything is hidden behind.
The most recent work in the exhibition include ‘Wordpairs’, a small series of works which feature old photographs from the artist’s personal archive. Bradley has laid images on white surfaces as if about to create a book or a poster, complete with the graphic registration marks. The correlations are hidden from the viewer but in Wordpairs (2) and (3), 2010, a family story is implied. A fine-featured man from several generations ago looks out at us; in the companion piece a small girl in a 1970’s photo taken on a Cornish beach fixes her sights through binoculars out to sea. Now she trains her gaze on him across the years.
The earliest work in the exhibition has been remade for ‘Naming Spaces’ and gives the exhibition its title. First made in 1989, three young women, full of glee and charm, are captured in two images, blurred to add both imediacy and transience. Overlaid are two texts from Proust as a memory trigger.
Epithalamion: Song for Cornwall, 2010, is a hymn to marriage. The major threat to the local flower trade is the intensive farming methods of the Dutch industry, which buys up flowers from Kenya, Colombia and now Russia., and flies them round the world to be delivered to supermarkets and specialist florists everywhere, including Cornwall. These large images are canvas pigment prints pinned to the gallery wall, making reference to fabric banners that advertise or protest or identify. However, their rich painterly quality also recalls tour de force still-life paintings in which, of course, the Dutch once specialised. Drinks, snacks, wellies, Dutch flower buckets and a sign reading ‘We make Bouquets’ place the setting of Bradley’s works in the here and now, but a bravura representation of a tall glass vase in the scene acts like the mirror in van Eyck’s Arnolfini Wedding, though the artist in this case remains unseen.
The viewer stands in the middle of a 360 degree panorama of four lightboxes, the scene is an old flower barn on a farm near Penzance whose usage has now been revived by a local entrepreneur. Here, in the tableau in which wedding garlands are being fashioned, the florist has created a new project called The Cornish Flower Train, which is itself a marriage of marketing skills and the traditional flower farmer’s reticence. Bradley herself has made a work in acknowledgement called Flower Train a series of ten posters which will be displayed in railway stations on the line between Penzance and Paddington, marking the journey made by the legendary Flower Train which brought freshly picked flowers from Cornish fields overnight to Covent Garden. As befits a sequence that will be seen on a train line through spring, the images also succeed in their modest but powerful way to deal with time, light and seasons. Nine images are visible in the gallery from the street and the tenth, in an homage to Felix Gonzales Torres, is displayed as a large pile with an invitation for each visitor to help themselves, furl the poster and secure it with an elastic band, like the simple bunch of flowers. The last line of text on the giveaway is ‘the final choice was mine’, delivering the audience back to Proust.
This is an elegantly installed exhibition with clever variations of angles and corners, and combining intimate with more stage-like spaces. The lightboxes are seductive and the medium deliberately echoes advertising, glowing in an urban night scene. It is also a highly intelligent exhibition and a rare bird: one which brings the highly personal alongside the genuinely public projects and from which each gains substantially.