Geoffrey Bradford

Geoffrey Bradford's studio house a large, carefully selected and classified collection of odds and ends of material found on various coasts. Out of the sea they gradually reveal layers of colour, indentations of surface and characteristics of form. They all have histories. Time promotes a metamorphosis revealing flaking depths of paints and rust stains of orange and brown. Surfaces and edges are worn by use and misuse. Tossed in wind and water, ground and hammered by stone and pebble, these riches from the sea offer themselves to the sculptor for his constructions.

Sometimes the coming-together of the right elements is brisk and natural. Colour and surface echo mood and reminiscence, producing an equivalence for something seen or felt in a particular location. Other pieces have a much longer gestation sometimes involving the difficult decision of selecting part of a found form; where to make a cut, which part to reject. Such a decision involves the resolution of the natural way to interfere with the form as it was found.

These small sculptures are tightly composed interior worlds of related forms, fairly well separated from the real world outside. There are also threaded shapes which dangle from wires or cords. Dried and weathered paint surfaces are suggestive of ripples in sand or water. Such references, however, never interfere with the more essential formal sculptural elements.

The hand of the sculptor, his cutting or joining methods, are barely evident. His ways are subtle, almost secret. It is as if these scultured pieces were always intended to be as they are. Geoffrey Bradford works as a kind of midwife to natural forms, an enabler content to give his forms their head. His main input is in the gently obsesssive way he allows and assists them to relate to each other through his private relish in their associated resonances.

Bert Isaac

Selected Recent Exhibitions

The ideas for the box as receptacle derived originally from a desire for containment; a way of trapping those echoes of memory and atmosphere which are the stimulus and springboard for the work. So the notion of the reliquary is often enhanced by the inclusion of small and analogous fragments, In the most recent work the partial use of glass to contain and focus on certain elements has further reinforced this. The small size of the work is dictated by the material and those elements within the box but also from a wish to involve the onlooker in close and contemplative scrutiny.

The all important use of colour, which intensifies the context of the sculptures, is as found with no artifical colour applied. There is surprise that such freshness and brightness can remain despite the elements. Surfaces are often multi-layered revealing great riches beneath. The relentless and continuing effects of time and weathering upon the appearance of things to alter, refresh and transform, is an on-going preoccupation.

In the making there is a clear purpose in devising physical means of joining rather than just glueing. Apart from one of aesthetics, the pleasure of problem solving snd skills learnt and implemented, these often concealed and secretive methods together with the more obvious tying, stitching and knotting, underline the interdependence of each element creating a sense of scale, proportion and association whilst imbuing a feeling of history and timelessness.

Geoffrey Bradford

All sizes are overall including frame.