Jyll Bradley: Hot Frame curated by Debbie Meniru, Pi Artworks Istanbul

In Hot Frame, British artist Jyll Bradley takes us back to her 1980s teenage bedroom, exploring queer identity and her relationship to nature through photography and sculpture. Her work in the exhibition deals with the physical and philosophical nature of thresholds. Hot Frame takes us through windows, hovers in doorways, and evokes open portals to move through or float within.

 

As a teenager, Bradley spent a lot of time sitting in her childhood greenhouse observing the play between sunlight and glass, a visual language that became integral to her work. In Self-Portrait in Greenhouse Doorway (1987), she is captured perpetually moving between the permeable structure of the greenhouse and the lush garden that surrounds it. ‘Standing in the threshold of the greenhouse,’ she notes, ‘I remember the feeling of being inside and outside at the same time. Lately, I’ve come to see this as a super-power. I think of it as the basis of empathy.’ Other self-portraits taken in her teenage bedroom, but only rediscovered over 35 years later, hint at her desire as a queer woman in the 1980s to be seen and understood, personally and also publicly through her art. She captures herself playing with gender, trying on different costumes and assuming the role of alternative characters. Of particular interest was the gender- and time-shifting protagonist from Virginia Woolf’s 1928 novel Orlando, who was inspired by Woolf’s lover, the writer and gardener Vita Sackville-West. Bradley’s interest in Orlando mirrors her own exploration of gender and sexuality, and her self-portraits underscore the uncanny resemblance between her and Sackville-West. In several, Bradley obscures her face from the camera. In exhibiting these photographs, what might initially appear to be a representation of hiding away becomes a public expression of vulnerability and, therefore, empowerment.

 

A bouquet of flowers appears as both a prop and a still-life, hinting at the concealed view to the garden and Bradley’s constant engagement with the natural world across her career. Inversing a binary understanding of light and dark, her solarised photographic negatives create an otherworldly, alien feel. Their retro, 80s aesthetic draws on Bradley’s love of 80s British pop culture and David Bowie’s iconic Ashes to Ashes music video. Throughout her career, Bradley has been interested in ‘queering minimalism’, examining notions of identity, nature, queerness and community through a minimalist aesthetic. Unveiled for the first time, Hot Frames (2025), Bradley’s new fluorescent sculptures, never quite settle between transparency and opacity, visibility and invisibility; they hover between states. Bright zips of neon loudly announce their presence while hazy yellow reflections dance softly across the wall. The Hot Frames are inspired by the horticultural structures used to grow tender plants in need of warmth and protection, qualities that Bradley often fosters for herself and the public through her art. The works are composed of two sculptural elements displayed at varying proximities, altering the size of the void that exists in between, like sets of windows that are opening and closing. Seen alongside her photographs, the Hot Frames symbolise the framing of ideas and self as Bradley looks back to her formative years.

 

In an ode to her teenage bedroom, the works are set against a backdrop of bespoke wallpaper, which references the agricultural hop fields of Bradley’s rural childhood landscape in the county of Kent, southeast England. Flashes of yellow represent the fractured sunlight as it illuminated her room. A series of drawings, Umbrella Work IV (2023), repeat similar complex linear patterns across blue carbon paper, revealing the mesmerising geometry of a hop garden and transforming it into the abstract rhythms of an architectural blueprint.

 

The exhibition is on view at Pi Artworks Istanbul until 6 December 2025.