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SPACE SHOTS: Living off the land

In her New Bedford studio, Lori Bradley talks about her artwork.
By Deborah Allard

Herald News Staff Reporter

Posted Sep 23, 2010 @ 03:15 PM

Last update Sep 23, 2010 @ 11:30 PM

NEW BEDFORD —

Lori Bradley, who sees life as a moving collage of moments, finds her inspiration in landscape.

Leaves and vines are magical to the mixed media artist. They show up in paint, ceramics, photographs and graphics.

“I’ve just always liked them,” Bradley said. “It just kind of evolved.”

Many of Bradley’s pieces are collages, bringing together a mixture of media, color and texture.

“It gives me more freedom,” Bradley said.

Bradley rents studio space at Hatch Street Studios in the Nashawena Mill Complex, which dates back to 1909. Some 30 artists rent studios on the third and fourth floors and create everything from jewelry to furniture in the massive brick building.

Bradley’s current project is creating dimensional mosaics of ceramic leaves and other embellishments on mirrors.

First, Bradley creates her leaves and vines with clay molds and then fires them in a kiln in her New Bedford home. She uses her basement for this part of the work, and also sands and gives the pieces their finishing touches there in order to keep the dust out of her Hatch Street studio, where the pieces are affixed to the mirrors.

“I want them to look as random as possible,” Bradley said.

Some of her other collages are a mixture of graphics, often created with several photographs, manipulated on her computer, printed and then overpainted.

“I balance my time,” Bradley said. “Most everything has some collage element.”

Bradley, when not in her studio, teaches graphic design at Bridgewater State College.

She is a graduate of the Atlanta College of Art, now Savannah College of Art, and has a master’s degree from Massachusetts College of Art in Boston. That’s where she met her husband Mark Millstein, who teaches electronic media at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth.

Bradley, a native of Rochester, N.Y., lived in both Atlanta and Pittsburgh after her college years. She taught at the Atlanta College of Art for five years and was a department chairwoman.

Bradley has exhibited her work nationally, including the Booksmart Studio Gallery in Rochester, N.Y., Lexington Arts Center, Fuller Museum of Craft in Brockton, Narrows Center for the Arts in Fall River, American Craftsman Galleries, in NY, NY as well as in galleries in Orleans, Portsmouth, R.I., Newport, R.I., Denver; Danbury, Conn.; New Bedford, Providence and Marion.

She does commissioned pieces and sells her work online and at various shows.

E-mail Deborah Allard at
dallard@heraldnews.com.

Copyright 2010 The Herald News. Some rights reserved

Review of Marion Arts Center exhibition by David Boyce, New Bedford Standard Times;

"... Ms. Bradley's dozen monoprints employ a technique which layers photographic images of natural landscapes, flora, and fauna, built upon the outline forms of Gothic window arches and similar architectonic frameworks. In paeans to the Victorian sensibility of urging a spiritual return to nature, she employs modern technology in this body of work to both illuminate and belie her delight in its flexibility. But she hasn't fully eschewed the artist's hand here, enhancing her images further with applied paint, colored pencil, inks, and gold leaf. In addition, she has included in the lower margin of several of these works the poetry of the little-known Victorian writer Eliza Keary. The results bear an affinity to illustration, but with an intriguing perspective depth."