Within A Budding Grove takes its title from the second volume of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, which follows the protagonist’s adolescence and his increasing sense of self-awareness. As a teenager, Jyll Bradley spent a lot of time sitting in her family’s greenhouse in rural Kent observing the play between sunlight and glass, a visual language that has remained integral to her work since the 1980s. Presenting recent works across sculpture, photography, drawing and film, Bradley draws on the bold geometries of espaliers: agricultural structures developed to train and direct the growth of young plants such as fruit trees and hops so that their crops attain the maximum exposure to the sun.
In a series of new drawings, Bradley repeats complex linear patterns across blue carbon paper, revealing the mesmerising geometry of a hop garden and transforming it into an abstract architectural blueprint. Never quite settling between
transparency and opacity, visibility and invisibility, Bradley’s sculptures similarly hover between states. Bright zips of neon loudly announce their presence while hazy yellow reflections dance softly across the wall. The agricultural structures they evoke can be used as both gathering places and hiding spots to seek solitude. Meanwhile, Bradley’s photographic self-portraits hint at her desire as a queer woman in the 1980s to be seen and understood but also to hide away, obscuring her face from the camera and turning to abstraction in her art as a way to express the strange and unexpected.
Within a Budding Grove accompanies the presentation of Bradley’s interactive sculpture The Hop in Frieze Sculpture 2023 curated by Fatoş Üstek. The Hop was first exhibited as a ma-
jor commission for London’s Hayward Gallery and will find its permanent home in Poplar, East London, next year.
The show will run from Sept 20 to Sept 30.
