Artist & Environmental Historian
Bradley Verhelle is an interdisciplinary printmaker and environmental historian investigating how memory and place are shaped, contested, and retold through archives. Working at the intersection of art and ecology, their practice unfolds at sites marked by radical environmental change, extraction, and military histories. It is at these sites that public memory collides with archival absence and evidence to develop new truths—often in the form of mythologies—about living at sites of extraction.
Photographic printmaking is central to Verhelle's work; large scale alternative processes in photography operate at multiple temporal scales, mirroring the deep time and slow violences of often invisible environmental contaminants. The photographic matrix retains the truth of its original exposure, while the print bearing the marks of re-making—situating the photographer and the printmaker respectively as brokers of experience and memory. The photographer and the printmaker wrestle with one another despite being embodied by the same person, transforming the darkroom into a space where the act of remembering becomes a negotiation, and nothing is truly authentic. Through this process, Verhelle's work examines how collective memory is constructed, how the archive is collected and destroyed, and how the image participates in the rewriting of environmental histories.
Verhelle’s projects move between environmental history, archival research, and oral narrative, drawing from local mythologies, testimony, and site-specific inquiry to develop print-based installations and written works that operate as living and public archives. By weaving together analogue image-making, fieldwork, and narrative storytelling, their practice holds space for reflection on inheritance, preservation, and the re-imagination of contaminated and contested landscapes as plural and storied.