Robert Bradford
‘Recent ’Bloggers Bloc’ has delayed my next offering. How best to convey the magic of Robert Bradford and his witty work? Especially when it so often has such presence? Without being pompous? Sometimes it’s best to let images speak for themselves.
Who could resist giving this wonderful angel a second look? As she raises her ‘Renaissance’ finger skyward showing that she carries a message from on high. Perhaps she speaks of the power of recycling … perhaps she simply speaks of rock and roll. (One doesn’t, I suppose, preclude the other, especially if you look like her!) Look more closely and you will see she is covered in musical instruments. She was shown at the bi-annual sculpture exhibition held at Quennington this summer www.freshair2009.com, alongside her counterpart topical Toy Solider which has just been sold to Ripleys Museums USA.
It was when dog walking along a familiar, well trodden path in Cornwall, on a day that held no promise, that I first came across Robert Bradford’s work. Up on the road that rises out of Port Gaverne in North Cornwall, overlooking a sultry grey high tide sea, lay this majestically large scale nude female, brazen and unworried by northerly winds or short dark days. The neon of her plastic form tantalising in the fading light, against the granite of her winter cove backdrop.
Rough seas throw up endless depressing ever lasting, indestructible shoreline rubbish. Yet here she was in defiance of all that, beautiful in spite of all the plastic nonsense she was made of. On closer inspection, the line of her body just too thoughtful and knowing, too beautiful to have been thrown together by sheer chance, the humour of her fabric, her make up, so irresistable, full of wit and life. The once loved Barbie dolls, plastic cars and tags, clothes pegs, water pistols, Christmas cracker, Action Man all artfully put together to create her. The invention, originality and humanity of her still lingers in my head when I climb that bit of the road, as I turn to the headland. She has now gone, I don’t know where, but surprisingly, for quite some time she remained, Community Project that she was – at least a summer, a winter or two. The space she occupied feels somehow empty.
For a long time after that I saved many plastic oddments. In the hope, one day, of creating my own recycled beauty. Only trouble was that at the rate this collection grew my attempt at a statue was never going to be more than a sad little figurine.
I have mislaid the pictures I had of her (another Blog delay as I tried to search them out), but this original art form of Bradford’s has clearly continued growing from strength to strength. Particularly since it was only in 2004 that he began experimenting with a series of sculptures which used plastic toys as their main modelling material. After trials with two unsatisfactory construction methods he began screwing the toys into wooden armatures and found that this proved both strong and far more highly adaptable as a method. I think my ‘pink lady’ found on the coastal path must have been one of his very earliest plastic pieces.
Look at his work now and you will see how highly developed and varied his pieces can be www.robertbradford.co.uk My favourite is ‘Pug Two’:
Not long after my coastal discovery I found his work a bit closer at hand, on exhibition at Mauger Modern Art in Bath www.maugermodern.com. I found myself drawn once again to a female form, this time with wings! A quirky and seemingly fallible ‘Blue Angel’ who had ‘come a cropper’. I didn’t realise, at first that I was looking at the same man’s work; the same wit and presence, different medium and method.
Though I think ‘Angel Splat’ probably photographs better!
His ‘pyrotechnic’ displays are also brilliant – stirring the most fundamental of our senses, reminding us, somehow, of our humanity. Very beautiful, transitory and bizarre.
Posted by Katie Barr-Sim 11 months ago in Art
About Katie Barr-Sim
Katie is a business development director. She still wonders what she’ll be when she grows up but has always had a keen eye for design and a way with words.