Artist & Environmental Historian
Bradley Verhelle is an multidisciplinary printmaker and historian investigating place is shaped, contested, rewritten through archives and public memory. Working at the intersection of art, ecology, and history, their practice unfolds at sites marked by radical environmental change, resource extraction, and military history. It is at these sites that public memory collides physical and archival evidences of change to develop new truths—often in the form of mythologies—about the legacy of altered landscapes.
Photographic printmaking is central to Bradley's work, which examines how collective memory is constructed, the relationship between imagination and the archive, the power of storytelling and the public imagination to further environmental justice. Working in large-format darkrooms, Bradley's method of layered color printing distorts the truth often expected of photographs. Where the raw image or digital negative corresponds to a scientific, archival, and absolute method of documenting a point in space and time, Bradley's protracted method of printing suggests how these spaces surface in public memory. As a product of public imagination, contaminated landscapes are defined by a diverse set of individual senses of space. Informed by the same types of observations that support community science, a community's dataset of senses of space can be exchanged, altered, and rewritten, buegeoning into a complex network of speculation about the past and future of local landscapes.
Where the photographic matrix captures a documentary truth of a landscape, the print therefrom bears marks of re-making—situating the photographer and the printmaker as brokers of experience and memory. This is never a balanced exchange—data must be destroyed for new information to be created—the darkroom becomes a space where the act of remembering is a process of negotiation and imagination.
Bradley's work suggests that damaged landscapes should be understood as non-static, especially when the qualities of such damage is undocumented or invisible. Their projects oscillate between image-making, archival research, and oral narratives about the environment; drawing from local mythologies, testimony, and site-specific inquiry to develop printed installations and written works that operate as living and public archives. By weaving together analog image-making, narrative storytelling, and histories of environmental violence, their practice opens space for reflection on inheritance, preservation, and the re-imagination of contaminated and contested landscapes.