The Sweetest Taboo Painting

Rebecca Bradley’s practice investigates themes of landscape and memory through painting. By a process of studio and site based research, she explores how our sense of place is not certain but contingent upon what we believe and what we choose to remember. Her paintings reflect on, and evoke our lived and deeply subjective impressions of place. She salvages and embeds materials, such as rubble and sand, from these, often transitional sites, to build up surfaces that punctuate and disrupt the traditional two dimensional picture plane. For Bradley this process is a bid to archive a sense of instability, and alludes to the volatility of these landscapes from ongoing human and ecological interventions. “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, University of Southampton, excerpt from talk delivered on the occasion of the opening of Provisional View Exhibition, September 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, writer and curator, in Paper Visual Art Journal "Outstanding textural paintings based on landscape"; Aidan Dunne, The Irish Times visual art critic