Flora Bradwell
Flora Bradwell
Family, 2020
Acrylic on canvas
76 x 101 cm
About this work
Made during the first national lockdown in the UK, Family is part of a series of paintings exploring notions of claustrophobia, crossed boundaries and surreal, domestic anticipation. The newly developed characters of the vagina-dentata boots prepare to devour fingers, toes, tips and nips, while a worried hair creature observes at arms length from outside. For the artist, boots are ripe with symbolism: Nancy Sinatra's These Boot Are Made For Walking, Kinky Boots, the saying “tough as old boots”, the urban dictionary's definition of “old boot” to describe an old used up vagina, “there was an old lady who lived in a shoe”, Old Mother Goose and goose stepping. The boot feels like the archetypal solid and well-used vessel, but here the boots have lips and teeth, and they harbour a hunger that no amount of homemade sourdough bread can sate.
About Flora Bradwell
Flora Bradwell is an artist and curator currently completing an MFA in Painting at the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL. Her practice is driven by a compulsion towards the carnivalesque, a vibrant trashy aesthetic, and the desire to playfully rub the fantastical against the everyday. Through appropriating visual tropes, throwaway narratives and contemporary cultural references, and applying a surreal filter to them, Bradwell creates dimly-recognisable-but-imagined worlds. Throughout the work, camp and theatrics are employed to demonstrate the ridiculousness of patriarchal systems. Elsewhere, gossip fuels visual flights of fancy as the props of daily life are put on a pedestal.
Bradwell received The Felix Slade Award in 2018, and completed a residency at Colart, London, in 2019. Her work has been exhibited, screened and performed internationally, with shows at Sim Gallery, Reykjavik (2021), Saatchi Gallery, London (2020), Patio Project, London (2020), Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, London (2020), the Royal Academy of Arts, London (2019), and the European Media Arts Festival, Osnabruck (2018). She has also collaborated in curating site responsive projects, performance events, exhibitions and publications with Bad Art Presents, Inland Project and the icing room collective.
Education
2018-2021 MFA Fine Art: Painting, Slade School of Fine Art, UCL, London, UK (interrupted due to Covid-19)
2007-2009 BA Fine Art: Painting, City & Guilds of London Art School, London, UK
Awards
2018-21 Felix Slade Scholarship, Slade School of Fine Art, UCL
2017 ASC Artist Development Award for Inland: Neither
2015 HERE Film Festival Commission for The Ballade of the New River Path
2008 David Ballardie Memorial Award
Residencies
2019 The Fine Art Collective Residency, ColArt, London
2013 Biennale D’Art Contemporain du Perche, Chateau de Blavou, Normandy. France
Exhibitions
2020
Hungry Boots, Patio Project, London
London Grads Now, Saatchi Gallery, London
Slade Graduate Showcase, Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, London
Glutton, Wells Project Space, London
2019
Slade Interim Show, Slade School of Fine Art, London
Cartoons and Cereal, Offshoot Gallery, London
Catching Flies, University of Kent, Canterbury
Raw Materials: Plastics, Nunnery Gallery, London
Creekside Open, APT Gallery, London
Pulling Teeth, ASC Gallery, London
2018
23645721, Ovada, Oxford
General Store, Hewing Wittare, London
2017
Drink Soda, Richard Hamilton Building, Oxford
Gender Fluid, Ice Space, Bath
Royal Trash, Bethnal Green Working Men's Club, London
2016
Bella Lordwarf: More Cake Please!, The Exchange at Brunswick East, London
Garden of Earthly Delights, Tactile Bosch, Cardiff
2014
Burlesque & The Sensual Arts, Trispace Gallery, London
2013
The Cluen Dynasty Museum, Jacksons Lane, London
2012
BEEP 2012, Wales International Painting Prize, Swansea
2011
Parallax Art Fair, La Galleria, London
2010
Celebrating the Pomp Us, Topolski Gallery, London
2008
The Electricians Shop, Trinity Buoy Wharf, London
Publications
2018
Juggling Liliths Crumbs, Inland Project
Everyone's Asking if I'm OK / No One's Asking If I'm OK, the icing room
2017
INLAND#2: Neither, Inland Project
2015
Second Self Zine
2015
VideoFocus, Stigmart Art Press