"Us" -A Retrospective

In Bailiffgate 16 Sept 2025- 14 Dec 2025

Sarah Bradford's personal statement:

Looking at this body of work made over a lifetime, it is clear I have ranged far and wide for my subject. Inspiration has come from the things that touch me: music, places, objects, interiors, and, for the past twenty years, landscape. It is autobiographical in a sense because it relates to my experience of the day to day and its concerns are the ordinary and familiar.

Colour has played a huge role defining mood, time of day or year along with the mark making that becomes the language of equivalents indicating not only the formal qualities of painting such as structure, form, depth and surface, but also the emotional key upon which it depends. Brushes, scrapers and hands are used to that end. Oil paint of different consistencies is progressively laid down: scumbled, blotted, scraped over extended periods of working until the surface becomes saturated with incident and activated by its own history.

Geoffrey Bradford's personal statement :

It is difficult to write about what it is I do, to find a phrase that succinctly characterises my work. Early on it was straight forward; I went to art school and gravitated towards figure modelling and drawing. I learnt traditional craft skills, processes, and methods of production. That has stayed with me and formed the basic grammar that developed over time into a personal vocabulary. My father had a foundry, and I was drawn quite naturally towards the alchemy of transformation of material through moulding and casting.

I am a maker. I have an idea but never sure of where it will lead or where the process will take me. It is this not knowing that challenges and excites me. It is a materials led process that begins by my sorting and laying out fragments of found and salvaged materials: tearing, folding, cutting and combining, adding colour and drawing, or scraping away to reveal hidden layers and textures to evoke another reality. For years I created boxes made from all manner of found materials gleaned off beaches. Others have described them as being like reliquaries. To begin with they were open boxes, then partially glazed and finally fully glazed which led to the excavation series “Finding Stories” where moulded and cast objects were combined with studio waste and wrapped like an archaeological exhibit - puzzling and not able to be defined. My most recent collaged work revisit’s old themes: the coast, above the land, exploring rooms, glasshouses. I want and like to be surprised.