Bradley’s practice depicts a world in which we argue with the past and contemplate its unrealized potential. A world in which ideologies of wholeness and harmony are disrupted by deviance and the taboo. The hollow pleasures of war and violence are recognized as an inherent social impulse, which provides an entry into confronting the past and the ethical mapping of the contemporary. As a reaction to the motivation of the victim, perpetrator, and rescuer his practice contemplates the relationships between religion, race, and power.
Utilizing as material; myth, objects, philosophies, and histories his methods recontextualize and contemplate the possibility of the absolution of guilt and creating empathy through human effort. Through strategies of appropriation, juxtaposition, and projection his methods characteristically involve marginalized techniques, the remaining sediments are later transformed in his practice into what he proposes is a “passive-aggressive landscape”. This area helps situate his practice to engage dark ecological philosophies and American cultural traditions. The schism between how we perceive these landscapes and how objects react to them is fraught with suspicion. To relieve this strain, Bradley creates new discourse by combining intimate personal histories against the larger historical records. Tracing his desires we are supplied with means of understanding successful and lasting aesthetics, and the ability to forecast subsequent changes within the Anthropocene.
Title: Coming Forth by Day V
Year: 2019
Medium: Acrylic and Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: 61 × 46 cm
Title: COMING FORTH BY DAY X (TRIPTYCH)
Year:2020
Medium: Oil and acrylic on canvas
Dimensions: 91.5 x 183 cm
91.5 x 61 cm ea.
“The triptych was created whilst in lockdown: an exploration of longevity, stability and the current relationship with visual emblems and an accounting of symbols and systems. I had a yearning to discover timelessness amidst changing pasts and faiths. During times of shared forgetting and remembering, the narratives of sculptures encourage a frame of mind that is directed towards successes and victories”.
Title: Ex Nihilo
Year: 2018
Medium: Collage (Found book pages, paint, cotton, silver foil)
Dimensions: 103 x 67.5 cm (Framed)
Bradley Foisset explores the idea of transformation and its possibilities, relating to historical records of moon exploration and Hollywood. He is interested in the transformation of ordinary objects into catalysts that bring about abundance, love and protection. By creating monuments or talismans, artists can manipulate objects and materials to confer power upon them – through prayer, anointing, inscribing and so forth. Bradley aims to channel meanings through object and material interference in a similar kind of alchemy, bringing components together to form more than the sum of their parts. Touching upon myth, objects, magic, histories and superstition to contemplate the possibilities of transformation, he has applied materials to his works as an act of challenging cultural authority and historical understanding.