Born in London, Rebecca Bradley has lived and worked in Ireland for the past 27 years. She holds an MA (Art and process) and BA in Fine Art (painting) from CIT Crawford College of Art. In 2019 she was selected for the International painting residency /symposium at the Mark Rothko Art Centre in Latvia.
Recent exhibitions include: Memory Edits, Sternview Gallery, Cork (2020); Athens Open, Art no. 23, Greece, (2020); Mark Rothko Art Centre Selected, Riga National Library, Latvia, (2020); This is a painting show, Sternview, Cork (2019); International Symposium exhibition, The Mark Rothko Art Centre, Latvia (2019); We each have our own Landscape, The Arthouse, London, (2019); Small works, Lavit Gallery, Cork, (2018); Municipal Art Gallery of Piraeus, Athens (2018); Misc Arts, Timisoara, Romania (2018); Thresholds, Gonzo Unit, Thessaloniki, (2018); Nostalgia, Art number 23, London, (2018); The More You See the Less You Hold, Sternview, Cork,(2017); Art Works, Visual, Carlow Arts Festival, (2016); Utopia Dystopia, Fringe Arts Festival, Bath, UK, (2016); Vestiges of Place, Seamus Ennis Arts Centre, Naul, (2016).
Bradley’s practice explores how our sense of place is not certain but contingent upon what we believe and what we choose to remember. She explores the margins of urban and rural landscapes such as suburbs, coastlines and agricultural land, and considers their potential to evoke and obscure the transience of natural and human narratives. For Bradley the process of making is analogous to the shifting experiences of perception and recollection. Densely layered and textured paintings expose the tactile process of adding and removing materials; surfaces are rendered pitted, fragmented, incised, suggesting the cumulative and eroding effects of time and exposure.
‘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.’
Sarah Hayden, 2015.