Jyll Bradley: Running and Returning
Renowned artist Jyll Bradley asked me to design and make a pair of architectural models for her solo show ‘Running and Returning’ at The Box gallery in Plymouth.
The exhibition looks at her three-decade career spanning film, installation, photography, self-portraits, and new works, here seen together for the very first time.
The Hop
The Hop is inspired by the long history of the working-class East End families who escaped London for seasonal working holidays in the lush hop gardens of Kent.
The design echoes the geometry of Kent’s unique hop growing structures, and was originally installed at London’s Hayward Gallery in 2022.
For ‘Running and Returning’, Jyll Bradley needed to represent the project in three dimensions. Having previously collaborated on a pair of competition projects, Jyll got in touch with me and asked if I would design and make a new model.
The biggest challenge of recreating a large installation in model form is scale: pieces that are chunky at life size become tiny, weak, and impossible to handle at model scale.
The design of the model began with hand sketches, exploring rough ideas on paper to test the various options.
Next, a digital model allowed information to be extracted and used to create high precision puzzle pieces, from laser-cut fluorescent acrylic and acid-etched nickel silver.
The pieces came together snugly into 35 units, and finally 16 thin slivers of walnut veneer were cut to size and added to each unit by hand.
A series of prototype models helped check for potential pitfalls, and fed back into the design process.
Green/Light
Jyll Bradley’s first building-scale commission - Green/Light - was built for the Folkestone Triennial in 2014.
The recurring theme of the hop garden is here represented more literally, with twine looping across a grid of shimmering hop poles.
The model making challenge this time lay in creating a miniature working tensile structure.
The horizontal cable network became a welded metal grille supported by the poles, and the base was covered with an array of eye hooks.
The final challenge was to weave 100m of thread between grille and eyelets.
It was a delight to work with Jyll again to bring these exhibition quality models into being, and to give the projects life beyond their original manifestation.
Materials: Birch faced plywood, cork, walnut dowel, nickel silver, fluorescent acrylic, mirror film, steel eye hooks, and 100m of thread.
