Flora Bradwell MRSS

I am a London based artist whose playful practice revels in the generously grotesque. I completed my MFA in Painting at The Slade School of Fine Art in 2021, receiving the The Felix Slade Award, The Jeanne Szego Prize and Sarabande Emerging Artist Bursary. In 2023 I was winner of the Gilbert Bayes Award, recipient of the A-N Artist Bursary and Artist in Residence at the Van Gogh Huis, Zundert. My camp, carnivalesque work encompasses painting, sculpture, video and performance and has been shown internationally including at the Matts Gallery, Saatchi Gallery and The Royal Academy of Arts, London, Liminal Gallery, Margate, Zaratan, Lisbon and Future DMND, LA. I have undertaken residencies at Elephant Lab, London (2022), Lisbon Social Press, Lisbon (2022), Cyprus College of Art, Paphos, SIM, Reykjavik (2021) and Colart, London (2019). I also curate art happenings and exhibitions and am currently Co-Director of Bad Art Presents.

A compulsion towards the carnivalesque, a vibrant trashy aesthetic and the desire to playfully rub the fantastical against the everyday drive my work. Compositions of frescoes, cult manifestoes and nursery rhymes are squeezed through a generously grotesque filter to create dimly recognizable imagined worlds. Camp and theatrics are employed to demonstrate the ridiculousness of patriarchal systems and gossip fuels visual flights of fancy as the the props of daily life are put on a pedestal.

The worlds I create are dripping with the bodily. Oversized vagina dentata booty characters sing melodies to passers by, their PVC lips glistening against the rough hewn fabric of their quilted bodies. Two meter tall inflatable hands invite you in for a hug or a high five, whilst simultaneously unsettling with their scale. A topsy turvy bearded Medusa's head hangs from a metal hook, the ping pong eyeballs of each snake fixing you with a crazed stare. These hybrid creatures, sewn from oversaturated fabric or painted gaudily with rustoleum are like rides at a disused theme park: familiar, but warped; serving equal measures of fun and menace.

Increasingly I am moving to make these immersive worlds more realised. The symbolic language of my practice has been enriched by a series of residencies over the last two years. Like a magpie I have collected architecture, narratives, characters and colours from Iceland, Cyprus and Lisbon and woven them into my work's alphabet. I am also seeking to broaden the materiality of the environments I make: to layer more textures in order to create a deeper experience for the visitor to my worlds. Space is also on the frontier of my current experiments: I am exploring it via the performative potential of the picture plane; through treating sculptural objects as flat surface by painting them; and in the creation truly immersive sculptural painted environments.