Major Jyll Bradley exhibition will trace a journey of discovery

Known for her large-scale public commissions, that include The Hop at the Hayward (2022) and Green/Light (for M.R.) (2014) for the 2014 Folkestone Triennial, Jyll Bradley: Running and Returning will present a new film and sculptural installation The Meeting, alongside works of historic significance. Seen together for the first time, the exhibition will reveal an intimate path of rediscovery.

Throughout her career, Bradley’s work has sought to examine notions of identity, urbanity, light, nature, queerness and community through a minimalist aesthetic, which she refers to as ‘queering minimalism’. For Bradley, minimalism offered an opportunity to carve a space out for herself through light omitting or light seeking objects. Adopted as a child, finding her place has been central to her work. Through a series of films, sculptural installations and intimate self-portraits, she invites you to enter her world.

For 35 years, Bradley has experimented with light as a medium, a means not only to convey metaphors but as a material that activates her work, particularly sculpture, as viewers move around and through them.

Visitors will enter the exhibition via Tavistock Place outside St Luke’s where The Hop, originally commissioned for The Hayward in 2022, will be installed. This vibrant interactive sculpture connects urban landscapes with rural hop gardens. The Hop is set to project a spectrum of colours around The Box’s public square on Tavistock Place throughout the summer, creating a cathedral of light and a site for gathering and performance. Upon entering the show, the first image to be encountered is a portrait of Bradley set against the backdrop of a greenhouse in her native Kent. From this point, a deeply personal journey unfolds to reveal universal themes that will resonate with audiences.

Two films narrated by the artist provide a framework for memoir, bringing Bradley’s adoption to light and revealing her exploration of identity and sense of self. M.R. (2021) (2021) focuses on the search for her birth mother while a new film entitled The Meeting (2025) explores the experience of meeting her for the first time. Shot in the Palm House of London’s Kew Gardens, the location represents notions of being both inside and outside, of being both accepted and distanced.

Bradley was the first artist to use commercial lightboxes within her practice in the UK, grounding her early works within the structures of light. A pioneering technique, it allowed her to infuse her photographic practice with sculptural elements whilst harnessing light as a material. It also acted as a tool to explore identity in a less prescriptive, more poetic and personal way. Naming Spaces (1989) and Urban Cowboys (1990) will be on display for the first time in around 15 years.

Within a Budding Grove, an award-winning installation first displayed in Miami as part of Untitled Art in December 2024, will be expanded for Running and Returning. Titled after the second volume of Proust’s 'In Search of Lost Time', the work recalls the increasing sense of self-awareness of Proust’s protagonist during his adolescence.

Self-portraits and sculptures will be displayed in this memory room, set against the backdrop of a wallpaper based on complex hand-drawn patterns by Bradley that reference the hop gardens of her childhood landscape. Invoking her teenage bedroom, Within a Budding Grove traces a personal map across the wall with flashes of yellow representing the fractured sunlight as it illuminated her room.

The photographic self-portraits in Within a Budding Grove examine what it was to be a young queer female, balancing the need to be seen with the instinct to hide away. Whilst studying at Goldsmith’s College, London, Bradley would return to her family home in nearby Kent, experimenting with photography and assuming the role of alternative characters.

She was particularly interested in the protagonist Orlando, from the eponymous novel written in 1928 by Virginia Woolf. Inspired by the bisexual writer Vita Sackville-West, Bradley’s focus on the character was twofold: it mirrored her own explorations of gender and sexuality as well as the striking resemblance between herself and Sackville-West. Smaller self-portraits see Bradley play with the scale of her work as she explores how memory shapes the way in which we view our experiences as we seek to summon the past.

The photographic series Flower Train (2010) focuses on the struggle to make personal, geographic and economic connections through the lens of the flower trade in the south west of England, the region where Bradley’s adoptive family come from.

A new sculpture titled Running and Returning has been created using light-reactive materials and is the first freestanding sculpture by Bradley intended for an indoor setting. Running and Returning is rooted within the artist’s ongoing interest in how light is utilised within agricultural architecture to nurture and to grow.

Jyll Bradley: Running and Returning will be accompanied by a major new publication on Bradley’s work. Texts have been contributed by Ralph Rugoff, Director of the Hayward Gallery; Noreen Masud, British writer and literary scholar; Gemma Rolls-Bentley, curator and author, and Fatoş Üstek, curator of Frieze Sculpture.

The Box will also have a series of related displays on show in its Active Archives gallery that delve into the connections Bradley has with Plymouth and the South West through her adoptive family.

Image credits:
Header and image 4: Jyll Bradley, Within a Budding Grove, 2024. Installation view, Miami 2024. Courtesy of the artist.
Image 2: Jyll Bradley, The Hop, 2022. Image Thierry Bal. Courtesy of the artist.
Image 3: Jyll Bradley, The Meeting, 2025. Courtesy of the artist.
Image 5: Jyll Bradley, Self Portrait, 1987-2024. Courtesy of the artist.