The artist has an inherent dilemma . . . the urgent need to communicate and the still more urgent need not to be found.- D.W. Winnicott
I once heard a story about an ancient people and their ritual initiation of adolescents into adulthood. Elders would take the young person deep into the earth through a series of caves. The opening of the last cave was very narrow, just wide enough for the body to slip through. The stone floor of the cave held a deep pool of water. The initiate was directed to step into the pool and as the water covered the young person, they became aware for the first time of who they really were and of their purpose. At the precise moment of supreme realization, the initiate was struck on the head. All their knowing disappeared. What was left was a trace, a vague pulling that if followed could lead them back to the center of their revelation.
The work I've created on this site is a record of being pulled
back towards that center. The figure was my primary focus and discipline for many years. Eventually my practice shifted into an abstract formlessness that plays with perceptions of awareness. Images float, recede and advance, an interplay that mirrors human kind's own complex relationships. Today, the community based artworks I create are a product of the same interplay and engagement. Relationships are built, dissolve and transform into results that mirror who we are through lenses that surprise and delight.
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Carol Bradbury
RESUME
Click here to download a PDF of my current resume
Winnicott Quote, Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment. 1965. New York: International Universities Press.
| | A multidisciplinary artist and designer, Bradbury explores the interconnected realms of dream, myth and the mundane. During a
5 year study in Zurich, Switzerland, she immersed herself in the ideas of Carl Jung and came to understand how images found in our dreams and everyday lives can act as powerful gateways to personal growth and transformation. Like the dreams she studied, her paintings contest a singular notion of reality by shifting the viewer into multiple psychological directions.
Creativity is paradoxical. To create, a person must have knowledge but forget the knowledge, must see unexpected connections in things but not have a mental disorder, must work hard but spend time doing nothing as information incubates, must create many ideas yet most of them are useless, must look at the same thing as everyone else, yet see something different, must desire success but embrace failure, must be persistent but not stubborn, and must listen to experts but know how to disregard them.
--Michael Michaelko
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