The exhibition features two of Bradford’s ‘Chime’ pieces alongside performance and text written by the artsists personal collaborator Neville Johnson.
In December 1910, Georges Claude, French engineer and inventor, demonstrated the neon sign at the Paris Motor Show*. On that day he set in motion a series of events: he launched an industry, coined a new aesthetic for the 20th Century, and eventually enabled the creation of Linton Signs London Ltd which, one hundred years later, led Shane Bradford to Essex looking for neon tube off-cuts that were, somehow, meant to be.
The proverbial butterfly flaps its wings and causes a hurricane on the other side of the earth; Georges Claude creates the neon tube and Shane Bradford creates an artwork; in the gallery a visitor disturbs Bradford’s chimes and another chain of events is set in motion. Reverberations move through time and space and eventually coalesce into something seemingly distant and detached, providing the only claim to ‘newness’ available to us.
Bradford’s work exists as an expression of this ‘newness’, the accumulative effect of personal and universal histories of action, a search to progress the aesthetics that determine our cultural position. His art is often at the edge where sculpture and painting converge, bridging a gulf between concept and material. The exhibition ‘Meant To Be’ constitutes a moment at the forefront of ‘art’, soon to be swept away by the unrelenting progression of time.
* The gas neon was discovered by British chemists Sir William Ramsay and Morris W. Travers in London, circa 1898, and was named after the Greek analogue for “novem” or “new”.