Jyll Bradley: Power of What (Memory Room)
Pi Artworks presents Power of What (Memory Room), Jyll Bradley’s first solo exhibition in the UK since Running and Returning, her major presentation at The Box in Plymouth (2025). In both shows, Bradley has created intimate installations that explore memory and identity through photography from her archive, which she has juxtaposed with recent sculptures. Set against wallpaper created by the artist to reflect patterns and colours associated with the artist’s childhood home, these ‘memory rooms’ offer personal, interior spaces for self-reflection. A new series of solarised self-portraits will be presented alongside sculptures that represent the artist’s physical stance as well as a major work that summons the landscape of her formative years in Kent.
Power of What (Memory Room) will draw upon Bradley’s first studio which she established in the dilapidated, minimal greenhouse in her childhood garden. The structure provided a space for creative growth where the light that permeated the glass, fracturing into colourful prisms, became a vital medium that would be harnessed by the artist throughout her career. For more than 35 years, Bradley has sought to embody light, creating sculptures from plexiglass – a material she has selected for its translucent qualities – a material that absorbs and refracts the light source it is set within. Bradley’s greenhouse studio, being at once inside and outside, symbolised the artist’s feeling as a young, queer artist in the 1980s, being seen, yet being outside. What defines these ‘memory rooms’ is the sense of being abstract yet autobiographical.
As Bradley describes it: “There’s a personal sense of wanting to dig into transparency, climb inside light, embody the greenhouse, rainbow and all of its colours. I want to touch that which is immaterial, to capture and provide feeling with physicality. This strange space that the greenhouse offered me – a place of transparency, light – I have been considering what it was that was so powerful and personally affecting all those years ago. What was it about something so esoteric? That, to me, is the Power of What.”
Photographs that were taken in Bradley’s home and greenhouse studio in 1987, and which were not shown at the time, reveal the artist as she turns away – seeking the viewer yet instinctively hiding. The back of the artist’s head is depicted in a spectrum of solarised colourways. The experience of being surrounded by light and altered by its presence as it cast rainbows throughout a transparent space, becomes a language that Bradley uses to translate her experience as a young artist exploring her identity and sense of self through the lens of vulnerability. It is only as she looks away from the present moment that this meaning is revealed to her as a memory room.
The self-portraits will be presented against the backdrop of a wallpaper created by Bradley from a blown-up photograph that documents the action of light shining through one of the works in a new series of wall sculptures titled Hot Frame.
The Hot Frame sculptures have been created from the artist’s signature material, plexiglass and wood, bringing together the organic and inorganic. Bradley’s sculptures have previously been defined by the use of green plexiglass, but Power of What (Memory Room) introduces a new emotional colourway – dichroic. Dichroic refers to materials or optical elements that exhibit dichroism, which is the property of showing different colours when viewed from different angles or under different lighting conditions. The viewer will therefore activate each sculpture as they move around and through the installation, as light alters the perception and experience of each individual.
A rainbow derived from the artist’s palate will dance throughout the exhibition, as Bradley seeks to queer the space, saturating the room in a continuum of colour. The colours in the rainbow that we witness are always there, present within the light spectrum. It is only through the droplets of rain – the pain, the healing, the tears of experience – that this rainbow is revealed. Bradley’s lived experience brings the Power of What (Memory Room) and its rainbow into view.
In Self-Portrait in Greenhouse Doorway (1987), Bradley is framed by the greenhouse entrance, captured between its permeable structure and the lush garden that surrounds it. As with previous self-portraits her androgynous outfit and sideways glance reflect both youthful interiority and playfulness. In another image, her hand is seen outstretched within the greenhouse, fingers pressing against the glass pane.
A major sculpture unveiled at The Box in Plymouth, Running and Returning (2025) will not only assume a central position within the memory room, but it will also cast a rainbow spectrum of colour as it harvests the light passing through the gallery windows. Running and Returning is rooted within the artist’s ongoing interest in how light is utilised within agricultural architecture. The enduring cycle of renewal, growth and decline of the life cycle is summonsed by Bradley in the circular composition of the work, which is again created using dichroic film.
Jyll Bradley’s installation Within a Budding Grove is on view at Whitechapel Gallery, London as part of their 125th anniversary exhibition, East of the Aldgate Pump (on view until 6 September). Bradley’s first public commission in the USA Portal (for Silver Eel Cove) was unveiled at Lighthouse Works, Fishers Island, New York in May 2026 and continues until December.
NOTES TO EDITORS
ABOUT JYLL BRADLEY
Jyll Bradley (b.1966, Folkestone, UK) is a British artist based in London who works across installation, photography, sculpture, film and performance. Her practice combines the formal vigour of Minimalism with ideas of queerness, identity, light and community. Bradley studied Fine Art at Goldsmiths’ College (1985-88) and the Slade School of Art (1991-93). In her early works she used photographic lightboxes, which could be found in street advertising, as an artistic medium and was the first in the UK to do so. Bradley’s focus on community and place-making has led her to create acclaimed large-scale public works, using her signature material of fluorescent Plexiglas such as The Hop (2022) for the Hayward Gallery and Green/Light (for M.R.) (2014) for the 2014 Folkestone Triennial. Bradley’s installations often become sites for creative activity including performance and film reflecting her interest in art as a potent gathering place for diverse people and ideas.
In recent years Bradley has been exploring her extensive archive of photography and in particular self-portraiture from the late 1980’s and early 1990’s. This has given rise to gallery installations of photography and sculpture which she terms ‘memory rooms.’ These highly personal works reflect upon ideas of self and identity, past and present.
Bradley has presented exhibitions and projects both internationally and nationally for over 35 years. Her most recent exhibitions include her survey Running and Returning, The Box, (Plymouth, UK 2025); Frieze Sculpture (London, 2023); Threshold, (Kaunas, Lithuania, 2022); Pardes, The Fruitmarket Gallery (Edinburgh, 2021).
Jyll Bradley’s monograph Running and Returning was published by Kulturalis in 2025 with essays by leading writers including Andrew Renton, Professor of Curating at Goldsmiths College, London; Nicoletta Lambertucci, Curator of British Art, Tate, UK; Fatoş Üstek, Curator, Frieze Sculpture and Gemma Rolls-Bentley world expert on Queer art. Bradley’s work is held in major public collections including the Arts Council Collection, Government Art Collection, UK; Sheffield Museums Trust, UK, the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, UK; and National Library of Australia, Canberra. Her work is held in significant private collections internationally including The Sir Elton John and David Furnish Collection.
jyllbradley.com
@jyll.bradley
PI ARTWORKS LONDON
Power of What (Memory Room) is the first major exhibition of Pi Artworks’ first season at Perseverance Works, following the gallery’s inaugural summer programme. Pi Artworks opened its new Shoreditch home in June 2026 after thirteen years in Fitzrovia. Set within the historic Victorian Perseverance Works, the gallery retains the building’s industrial character, with its pitched roof, exposed steel trusses and large windows.
VISITING & PRESS INFORMATION
Jyll Bradley: Power of What (Memory Room)
6 October – 5 November 2026
The exhibition can be visited Tuesday–Saturday, 12–6pm, and at other times by appointment. For press enquiries, further information and high-resolution images, please contact jade@piartworks.com.
Pi Artworks London
6 Perseverance Works
Shoreditch, London E2 8DD
Directions:
Entrance at 25–27 Hackney Road, minutes from Shoreditch Church. Enter the main courtyard; Pi Artworks is in the building behind, with the front desk on the ground floor and the gallery on the first floor.
PRESS CONTACT
Sara Macdonald | saramairi@hotmail.com | +44 (0)7900 566 918
