Bradley Verhelle

artist & scholar

About Me

Bradley Verhelle is an interdisciplinary artist working in photographic printmaking and book-arts.  His work investigates boundaries between memory, place, and historical records, using analogue image-making and writing as a method of inquiry into how collective and subjective experiences of 'the past' take shape.  Verhelle's practice examines how histories are contested and rewritten in a tug-of-war of experience.  These constructed histories are unfixed—shaped by subjective experience—and opened up as collective memory.

 

Photographic printmaking functions as a critical medium steeped in its legacy of mechanical reproduction.  This reproduction is slowed down, reworked, and suffused with the shared memory of photographer and printmaker.  Each print carries a trace of its original exposure, bearing the marks of its re-making, situating the photographer as a witness and the printmaker as a participant in the act of remembering.  Even when the photographer and printmaker are the same person, they wrestle with one another through the act of remembering—of realizing an image.  The photographic process becomes entrenched with questions of collective memory and the archive, of recording and preserving the past, and of shaping how it is reimagined.

 

Verhelle’s practice extends beyond the studio into collaborative and public contexts. He works within archives to develop site-specific installations that function as living, historic archives—repositories of graphic and textual memory.  By moving between the material and the documentary, the intimate and the institutional, his projects cultivate space for reflection methods of inheritance, preservation, and re-imagination of our pasts.