Biography and Statement

My work in Sculpture has utilised combinations of recycled/upcycled  and utilitarian materials .  More recently he has returned primarily to paint on canvas and paper . To quote Charles Jencks on Post Modernism. ...... (contemporary) “artists want to know how to represent variety with integrity. One strategy is to choose the right style for the job. A case of serial revivalism.A further tactic is to provide heterogenous materials and shapes in a language which is fresh and enigmatic.“

I am an experimental type of artists. Ideas come from a wide variety of sources, and include :- psychotherapeutic concepts ( the artist practised as a therapist for several years). The culture and climate of the time. Physical experiments with matter and things... everything from fire to found objects, to past and present aesthetics and styles. People and other species, synthetic and natural worlds. All materials are potential sculpture , anything can be material for paintings . I try to deal with materials and content in a non hierarchical way  I work in series following a group ideas for as long as they feel they have potential for me ... Sometimes I like to contradict myself and go to what seems opposite of what I have been doing previously ! As series can last for a few months or several years ..


Series Overview | Toy Sculpture Series

For a long time now I have preferred to use materials that are not bland i.e. have some kind of history of weathering or use. One day about eight years ago out in the studio I was looking into my childrens box of outgrown / discarded toys which happened to be stored in the same building. I found myself  responding to the random collection of colours shapes and forms they made. I figured that if I could find a way of putting them together to constitute  larger forms they would have great potential as larger scale sculpture.
Over the next while I experimented with two other construction methods (which both had their downsides) - before one day about a year ago in frustration I tried putting a screw through one toy and then many others. To my surprise most didn’t crack or shatter and the new series has been largely based around and developed from that fact.
Ideally the pieces will work on many levels. The toys themselves interest me in their own right as mini sculptures by unknown and uncredited artists. Mostly I use the toys abstractly as forms with which to build muscle bone or internal or external organs but all types of human pursuits can also be referred to and represented through them - things loved or hated - things used and carried as tools etc etc. They provide interest in surface detail whilst making their contribution to the totalities. The toys also provide a moving history of fads and fashions as they pass through the media and our awareness temporarily significant and then forgotten.
Public reaction to the sculptures has been largely very positive (in some cases gleeful)- often children drag their parents to come and look at the pieces and then a whole sequence of recognition and recollection usually begins, naming the various toys and recalling the times and circumstances of their use. There is usually some fascination with the sculptures, the individual toys used and with the process of their acquisition and construction. Sometimes there is outright laughter. There is usually a whole process of going back and forth between looking at the sculptures as a totality and the individual parts from which they are made (which of course is my intention). Some people of course just say they are rubbish which of course is perfectly true! There is also often talk about consumerism waste and recycling, which whilst not being my central concern is also in my view positive when it occurs.
In a way the sculptures are also history pieces in the sense that you could date any one of them roughly speaking from the time that the last toy glued or screwed on to the structure was produced.`They are also monuments to the uncredited artists that produced the mini toy sculptures found on the works

 - Robert Bradford 2016

In 2018 I decided that I needed to make a big change ...much of the ' Toy Work' had been partly about consumerism and commodification but the works themselves were veering  too much to becoming products in themselves . One way to go was to deal again with paint and canvas after a break of years .. it would be both a familiar and an unfamiliar challenge . Artists are often seen as needing to 'find their style.' In theory I believe that  (as an ideal ) a style should evolve according to whatever is being expressed . It is a difficult route to follow. 

So first I made about 20 competely abstract painted collages on paper . Then I switched back to figuration for three large paintings all quite different but still referring to much older works ..

Then during the coronavirus lockdown  I  found myself working on five abstracted 'improbable'  linear landscape paintings called the 'Escape Series' with material sourced  from photographs and combined .These are yet to be exhibited. Now I am experimenting with large and small works involving people.

 - Robert Bradford 2020