Invitation to collaborate with local artist, Jyll Bradley, and The Box
Jyll Bradley would like to collaborate with adopted children and families to create a new ambitious survey exhibition Running and Returning.
We would like to invite adopted children and families to collaborate with The Box, Plymouth and a brilliant local artist, Jyll Bradley, to create a new artwork in response to her ambitious survey exhibition Running and Returning, on display at The Box in Plymouth from 5 April 2025 to 3 November 2025. The artwork will be displayed in The Box in Simmons Learning Room display case from 3 June to 14 September 2025.
To show an expression of interest please email Adam.Milford@plymouth.gov.uk
Running and Returning will explore over 30 years of the artist’s practice in Britain and beyond. It will present installations, sculpture, performance, film and photography. Importantly, it will demonstrate the cyclical inspiration that provides a basis for her practice.
Bradley’s early experiences shape her identity and practice. Growing up in rural Kent, Bradley was immersed in nature, light and the colour green – an instantly recognisable colour-feature in her work. She also spent many summers as a child in the South West, connecting with her adoptive relatives and the land. Her early memories from the region include noticing the light come through a stained-glass window in Stoke Damerel Church, located in a Plymouth suburb.
Background
In 1960’s Britain over 160,000 children were ‘given up’ for adoption at birth through a closed system which denied them any legal right to their identity until adulthood. Jyll Bradley was one of those children. Her film M.R. (2021) is a tender coming of age story exploring the subject of childhood adoption, creativity and identity. The story of M.R. is told through the sculpture installation Green/Light (for M.R.), commissioned for the Folkestone Triennial 2014 which marked her return to Folkestone, where she was born and adopted. The film is narrated by Bradley and draws upon diaries she wrote as a young artist at a time when she was searching for her birth mother as well as a sense of artistic identity. M.R. is a story of an artist in search of her creative origins and asks universal questions about why we make art and how art in turn makes us.
Jyll Bradley biography
Jyll Bradley (b.1966, Folkestone) is an English artist and writer based in London who works across installation, sculpture, performance, film and photography. Bradley studied Fine Art at Goldsmiths’ College (1985-88) and Slade School of Art (1991-93). In her early works she used photographic lightboxes, which could be found in street advertising, as an artistic medium and was one of the first artists – if not the first – in the UK to do so. She has worked as an award-winning writer for BBC Radio, creating original dramas and documentaries with a particular focus on women’s lives and hidden stories, with narrative storytelling being central to her work. Bradley’s focus on community and place-making has led her to create large-scale public works, using her signature materials of fluorescent Plexiglas and LED, such as Green/Light (for M.R.) (2014) for the 2014 Folkestone Triennial and The Hop (2022) for the Hayward Gallery.