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Canberra Today 14°/18° | Friday, March 29, 2024 | Digital Edition | Crossword & Sudoku

Review / Bradley’s ‘never disappointing’ construction of beauty

A folding screen produced by Julie Bradley with Elliot Bastianon
JULIE Bradley melds art, design and craft seamlessly in this latest offering of work that includes two exquisite room screens produced during her 2017 Hill End residency.

Bradley’s graphic, colourful work is instantly recognisable to a Canberra audience. Composing carefully as she works, she builds up multiple layers of abstract shapes using hand-coloured papers and then adds a top layer of exquisite line drawings of botanical detail in brightly-coloured gouache.

The process is a long-developed system, defined enough to be familiar but flexible enough to change and grow with her thematic interests, and seems to be shifting progressively away from the figurative.

Stones have preoccupied her for a few years now, and many of these works meditate upon what stones mean to humans and our culture. Some of them hold ideas about geology, salt crystals, sand grains, and precious stones. Others are related to the way words can be solid, yet not: building blocks able to be shifted.

When she was accepted for the Hill End residency, Bradley prepared by undergoing a daily drawing practice, inspired by David Hockney, who always drew something before lunch. She drew abstract shapes inspired by rock formations, thinking about rock fissures and the way something so seemingly permanent and solid always has spots of weakness.

She worked out some basic compositions to kickstart her work, not wanting to waste precious time once she was there. On her way into Hill End, she visited Merlin’s Look-out, a famous local spot that looks out across the old mine sites towards the Blue Mountains, and the first thing she saw was a massive split rock formation that was the twin of one of her drawings.

‘Split rock’ by Julie Bradley, mixed media
The resolved work, “Split Rock” (2018), is a fractured, ghostly conglomeration of pale whites and circled portals of geological time against a teal blue-purple evocation of dusk. The ever-present botanical elements are pushed back, hinting at seams, evoking the power that green matter can wreak against something seemingly unbreakable.

Another of Bradley’s preoccupations is the inclusion of Western art in oriental folding screens at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. The panels for these screens were often painted by visual artists – there is one by Grace Cossington Smith showing at the NGA right now.

Bradley approached furniture maker Elliot Bastianon to collaborate with her on two screen designs. Bradley’s design experience meant that she knew exactly what she wanted: an elegant frame made from a sustainable timber (Tasmanian oak) that would support the artwork visually but not overwhelm it.

The resulting objects are cunningly constructed by Bastianon to provide privacy with a teasing line of sight through the base, and the birch ply panels are removable, allowing Bradley to take them to Hill End in her car to work on them.

The wooden panels, she says, were a delight to work with, as they were firmer than her usual backgrounds of super-thick rag paper. They are direct meditations upon the many layers of Hill End as an historical site: geological disruptions, the golden glow of potential, and the embedded hopes, dreams and despair of the humans who have passed through. Viewers can dig into these folding panels for meaning, and if they do, there are plenty of ideas to be found. But I can also stand back and enjoy Bradley’s skill at constructing beauty, and in this she never disappoints.

If you would like to hear Julie Bradley talk about her work, there is an artist floor talk at ANCA Gallery at 2pm this Saturday, March 31.

                                                                                                     

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