CULTIVATING CREATIVITY

equilibrium of mixed metaphors These are especially prominent in her ceramics, textiles and smaller prints also on display, which culminate in the comic juxtapositions of Bucket Full of Nuns

In the adjoining gallery, Bradbury’s Stewards and Defenders explores the artist’s deepening understanding of the link between people and woodlands Bradbury is a Scottish-born painter who has created nature-infused installations and murals throughout the Pacific Northwest, in Asia, and the Middle East

For her Stewards and Defenders series, Bradbury visited the Fairy Creek logging blockade on southwestern Vancouver Island where she interviewed and photographed members of the encampment The resulting life-size portraits are painted in oils on irregularly-shaped plywood surfaces

The size and stature of the subjects prompts automatic reverence, even in casual poses that would suit Instagram

In Raven and Whaletail, which shows an embrace between land defenders of Cree and Pacheedaht First Nation heritage, hagiography is intermingled with the solidity of in-the-trenches companionship

“There wasn’t an agenda to depict them as heroic,” said Bradbury, “because I went in not really understanding who they were or why they were there. I was looking for people who were aesthetically expressive of where they were. ”

Bradbury’s images of West Coast landscapes are inspired in part by her admiration for paintings by Canada’s Group of Seven. Her Beloved Trees of our Coast includes the contortions of arbutus trunks in a composition evocative of Tom Thompson’s The West Wind with an important distinction: a woman and a youngster paddle in shallow seawater at one extremity of the canvas

“As much as I love [the Group of Seven], I’ve been feeling like: where are the people?” Bradbury said “What is their relationship to the land? As a landscape painter, I ask myself: am I guilty? Is it enough just to paint things that are extraordinarily beautiful so that we treasure them, or do I want to tell more of a story about people and our relationship to the land?”

Bradbury grapples with her questions by painting herself into the story In Sold, a self-portrait, she stands on the wooded lot she purchased in 2020 on Bowen Island Mum and Dad portrays her parents, who are volunteer stewards of West Vancouver parks

“I love story in my work,” Bradbury said. “I’m not one of these modernist painters who don’t use the word narrative. I think narrative is very important to me personally, and in art.”