A youth bedroom in Istanbul: Thresholds, light, and queer temporality with Jyll Bradley
- Seçil Epik
- 11 dakika önce
- 12 dakikada okunur
Jyll Bradley’s solo exhibition Hot Frame is on view at Pi Artworks Istanbul from 15 November to 6 December 2025, curated by Debbie Meniru. We spoke with Bradley about the fluidity of identity, the elasticity of time, and the queer negotiations of visibility
Söyleşi: Seçil Epik
Jyll Bradley. Photo: Berk Kır
Hot Frame, currently on view at Pi Artworks Istanbul and curated by Debbie Meniru, opens both a personal and conceptual window onto British artist Jyll Bradley’s practice spanning over four decades. Bradley is known for her large-scale public works created in collaboration with communities, her sculptural investigations into the spatial and emotional qualities of light, and her long-standing engagement with botanical structures. Yet this exhibition introduces an entirely different gesture: the artist suddenly pulls the viewer back into a teenager’s bedroom in the 1980s, her own formative space. Bradley’s works reveal how fragility and resilience can coexist on the same surface; one can sense it in the solarized planes, in the translucency of plexiglass, and in the way self-portraits taken forty years ago assume a new form within today’s spatial context. In Istanbul, the exhibition operates like a site where layers of time brush against one another: the past is never fixed; it reshapes itself as contexts shift, and Hot Frame stands precisely at the center of this ongoing reformation.
As we walk through the exhibition together, I listen to Jyll describe the intensity of her relationship with Istanbul and the attentiveness with which she approaches the city’s details. The fact that the floral arrangements in the exhibition are gathered from different corners of Istanbul makes it clear that this encounter is no coincidence, but rather a deliberate practice of “making place.” Jyll’s curiosity about the city renders every element in the exhibition even more deeply connected to Istanbul.
The fact that the portraits in the exhibition were taken forty years ago, during a difficult period for queer people in Britain, and are now being shown in Istanbul created a powerful feeling in me. Viewing Jyll Bradley’s youth photographs in Istanbul brings two different historical contexts into unexpected proximity: the repressive queer politics of 1980s Britain and today’s deeply fragile political and social climate for LGBTQI+ and queer communities in Turkey. This encounter is not only about making the past visible; it is also about how queer production acquires new meanings across different topographies. Jyll Bradley’s reconstruction of her teenage room in Hot Frame recalls that even in the most oppressive times, queer people documented themselves, kept archives, and continued to create, an act that was, and still is, a political gesture toward the future. The installation points to the mutability of both individual memory and our collective narratives. And the exhibition extends the nonlinear flow of queer time into a broader context that now includes Istanbul.
At the entrance of Hot Frame, we return to that moment at the door of your family greenhouse forty years ago. You’ve said that your entire practice, both in relation to light and to identity, was born from this state of “standing at the threshold.” How did this childhood feeling of being “inside and outside at the same time” become a foundational concept in your work today?
The quotation at the entrance¹ points directly to the first moment that shaped my entire practice. As a child, the most important place for me was the greenhouse in our garden. I never liked rooms with four solid walls; they felt closed, heavy, and airless. But the greenhouse created the sensation of being both inside and outside at once, the light always filtered in, passed through the glass, entered the space; it was a semi-transparent world. Looking back now, I see how this porousness of boundaries resonates with the idea of identity not as something fixed, but as something in constant transition. My relationship to light, transparency, and materials like plexiglass can all be traced back to that formative moment.
I remember that threshold moment very clearly. It functioned almost like a portal between interior and exterior. That threshold generated a kind of personal and artistic awareness for me. Standing in the doorway of the greenhouse felt like being nourished from both sides. Over time I began to understand it as a form of strength, inhabiting a space between inside and outside, creating a zone where visibility and invisibility are simultaneously possible. That feeling has profoundly shaped how I carry my identity and how I work with materials.
Jyll Bradley, Hot Frame, 175x35x11 cm, 2025
Inviting viewers into your teenage bedroom from the 1980s is quite a powerful gesture. What was it like for you to recreate this room?
It was a much more joyful experience than I had anticipated. When I photographed myself in those years, I was in a state that was both creative and exposed; vulnerable, even. Rebuilding my bedroom allowed me to feel that creative energy again and to form a connection between who I was then and who I am now. It became a truly special process.
So how did these photographs from your youth resurface 35 years later?
I was working on one of my Graft² pieces when I suddenly remembered these self-portraits I had taken as a teenager in my bedroom, especially the one at the center of the exhibition, where the line of my spine is visible. I had kept the negatives, so I took them out, began working with them again, and started placing them alongside the sculptures. Something very abstract and layered began to emerge. What I’ve done in this exhibition is essentially this: I recreated the room in which I took those self-portraits. Every portrait in the show was taken either in my childhood bedroom or in the family greenhouse. In all of them I’m dressing up, trying different hairstyles; in some I’m dressed like Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. Yet in every single one, I avert my gaze, I never look into the camera. So there is this striking tension between a creative, vibrant space and the vulnerability of turning my face away from the lens.
Afterwards, I began framing these portraits with plexiglass, a material I often use in my sculptures. My past work has involved communities and plants; many of my sculptural installations revolve around growth structures, trellises, hop gardens, glasshouses. For this reason, I wanted to expand the exhibition in Istanbul with a personal thread. We walked through the city collecting plants and flowers, turning them into small arrangements that connect both with the photographs and the exhibition space. Some came from wild weeds along the roadside; others from streets overflowing with plants and blossoms. We gathered some from in front of the Italian Consulate, others from the courtyard of St. Anthony’s Church. Bringing the texture of the city into the exhibition was important to me. With all of this, I wanted to make my love for Istanbul visible.
What kind of relationship do you have with Istanbul?
It really began through my work with the gallery, with Pi Artworks. I spent a long stretch of time here last September because the exhibition was originally meant to open then. That gave me the chance to get to know the city; afterwards I read The Museum of Innocence, visited the museum, and became completely obsessed with the book. I think I can safely say that Istanbul is my new favourite city.
Solda: Jyll Bradley, Hot Frame, Exhibition view, Pi Artworks Istanbul, 2025. Photo: Hadiye Cangökçe
Sağda: Jyll Bradley, Umbrella Work, Coloured tracedown carbon paper hot-mounted onto painted beech plywood board, 2023 (The artist’s Hot Frame presentation features this work in its transformed wallpaper version)
The self-portraits you present in plexiglass frames in this exhibition are accompanied by new sculptures, the drawing series Umbrella Work IV (2023), and wall coverings. In these drawings, you repeat intricate linear patterns on carbon paper, making visible the complex geometry of a hop garden. I’d like to talk a bit about the sculptures and these drawings as well.
Of course. As I mentioned, all of my sculptures are, in one way or another, tied to the idea of growth. A “hot frame” is an angled structure built to nurture plants, protecting delicate seedlings in their early stages. As with my other works, I begin by abstracting that idea, and then turn it into a sculptural language that works with light and space; for this exhibition in particular, it becomes a language grounded in the notion of the window and the frame. Window, frame, threshold… All of these are tied, for me, to processes of seeing oneself, framing oneself, re-articulating identity.
One important aspect of these new sculptures is that, much like relationships, they can move. Their components can stand very close to one another or open out completely, drifting apart. The work forms a constantly shifting relationship with both the space and the viewer; no element exists solely on its own. That relational structure is a natural extension of the practice I’ve been developing for many years.
As for the drawings, they refer to my childhood in Kent, in the southeast of England. There are enormous hop fields there; the plant used for brewing beer is trained to grow upward through a complex system of strings. I abstracted the geometry of that structure and translated it into drawings, which then became a wall covering spreading across the space like light. That was exactly the intention: to evoke the sensation of light rising as it slips across and reflects off a surface.
The entire installation revolves around the idea of framing oneself. It is, essentially, a story about how memory structures itself. In the exhibition, you’ll see three different versions of the same self-portrait: colour, black-and-white, and solarised negative. These repetitions show how a single memory can feel monumental one day and shrink to a tiny detail the next. The shifting scale and intensity of experience is something I find deeply compelling. This is why I refer to this section of the exhibition as the “memory room.”
Jyll Bradley, Hot Frame, Exhibition view, Pi Artworks Istanbul, 2025. Photo: Hadiye Cangökçe
There is a constant oscillation between hiding and appearing in your youth photographs. What does that impulse to hide mean to you now?
When I took these photographs, I never felt comfortable showing them. It was an incredibly difficult time for queer people. And there I was, in the middle of all that, making these intimate and vulnerable works in my bedroom. Back then, hiding was a form of protection. Not looking into the camera, turning my face away, solarising certain parts of my body… all of it was connected to the pressures of that period. Looking back now, I see that even within that hiding, there was a kind of openness. Today, fragility isn’t about concealment for me; it’s actually a way of making things visible, of opening something up.
Before this, I had never quite placed myself, literally at the centre of any of my works. Being able to bring these photographs into the light now, and to pay a kind of homage to my younger self, feels liberating. I’m revealing what remained hidden. Because you can hide within abstraction, yourself is always somehow present, even in a sculpture, yet still disguised. But these works mark a much clearer moment of visibility for me. People experience it as a powerful “coming into view” in the exhibition.
I feel genuinely lucky that I can do this now. And privileged too. Being queer in the UK today is far easier; people complain constantly, but compared to so many places in the world, we live with tremendous privilege.
Growing up in the 1980s in Folkestone, a small coastal town at a time when social pressures on queer people in the UK were intense, particularly under the shadow of policies of erasure like Section 28, what was it like? In such an atmosphere, what emotions or strategies did navigating, concealing, or expressing your queer identity require, and how have these experiences shaped the themes of light, thresholds, and visibility/invisibility that define your practice today?
Folkestone was an inward-looking coastal town. Imagine a place with none of the diversity or visibility you would find in London; you felt almost constantly isolated. And of course, it was the height of the AIDS crisis. Many of my friends and people I knew in the UK were dying, and there was a profound atmosphere of fear and othering.
During that time, I was photographing myself in my bedroom and in the greenhouse in our garden, which was also my first studio; very personal, very vulnerable images. Queer art at that moment was far more activist, far more direct. What I was making, by comparison, felt deeply internal, and I simply didn’t have the courage to show it.
Rediscovering these photographs 35 years later and bringing them into the open has allowed me to see how both I and the world have changed. It’s been, quite honestly, liberating.
Solda: Jyll Bradley, Hot Frame, Exhibition view, Pi Artworks Istanbul, 2025. Photo: Hadiye Cangökçe
Sağda: Jyll Bradley, Hot Frame, 175x60x11 cm, 2025
Queer art exists in many forms: body-oriented, activist, narrative… Yet you work with a more permeable, indirect, and minimal language. Considering that minimalism has historically been associated with a more masculine and rigid aesthetic, what kind of space did queer minimalism open for you? What drew you toward it?
In the 1980s, queer art was indeed much more political and grounded in activism, which was both important and necessary for its time. But simultaneously, a few artists and I were drawn to exploring identity through a more poetic, indirect, and minimal lens. Yes, minimalism carries a very male-dominated lineage: Carl Andre, Donald Judd… Yet for some of us, there was something exciting about claiming that language and transforming it. We took that masculine austerity and infused it with vulnerability, light, permeability, and a kind of quiet lyricism.
Queering minimalism became, for us, both an aesthetic and political gesture, one that allowed queer identity to be expressed in a subtler, yet still powerful, way. I was seeking a language that didn’t directly represent identity but moved around it, traced its edges. Light and plexiglas turned out to be perfect materials for that. Light is never fixed; it continually reshapes space. Plexiglas, with its transparency, mirrors the fluidity of identity itself. So my relationship with these materials emerged quite naturally..
Let’s talk about your connection to Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. Orlando is a figure who drifts across centuries, between genders, bodies, and identities, an origin text for many queer people, and certainly for me. In last year’s performance Above the Clouds: Underground, we staged an encounter between Orlando and Kenan, a trans character from 1920s Istanbul, performed by Bulut Sezer. The fact that Orlando had passed through Istanbul made this meeting feel even more charged, as if two queer temporalities were brushing against one another. Considering the play of costume, role, and identity in your youth self-portraits, what does Orlando mean to you?
Orlando has always been an essential text for me because it is utterly singular in every way. The elasticity of time, the shifting of gender, the androgyny… all of these elements resonated with me deeply back then. And, of course, the fact that Orlando is essentially a love letter from Virginia Woolf to Vita Sackville-West matters a great deal. I was often told in my youth that I looked like Vita, and if you are adopted, as I am, your eyes are always searching for someone who resembles you. Seeing someone who mirrored me in some way felt profoundly meaningful. That is partly why I slip into Orlando’s guise in certain self-portraits.
In this exhibition, the photographs taken forty years ago come together with today’s plexiglas sculptures. Time does not behave like a straight line here; it breaks, expands, flows in different directions. Orlando’s elasticity of time, the sense of moving back and forth, the pauses and leaps, aligns closely with my own practice. Light, too, is never fixed; it produces a new image at every moment. It is a profoundly performative process. Identity functions similarly, continuously reconstructed, continually staged. There is a natural parallel between the two.
Jyll Bradley, Hot Frame, Exhibition view, Pi Artworks Istanbul, 2025. Photo: Hadiye Cangökçe
How has your way of documenting yourself changed over time? How has this shift shaped your art and your sense of vulnerability?
After taking those photographs, I actually stopped photographing myself altogether. At the time, I didn’t have the courage to show them; they felt far too vulnerable. Over the years, my sculptures gradually became a kind of self-portrait, I allowed light and surface to carry the image instead. Today I find myself returning to my old archive, revisiting hundreds of negatives. Working with those images feels more meaningful to me than taking new photographs. Vulnerability is no longer about shame; it has become a way of revealing something, of opening things up.
What kind of threshold exists between your large-scale public sculptures and the more personal, archival approach in this exhibition?
There has always been a sense of community in my public works, people gather, the piece is experienced in different ways through space and light. This exhibition, however, is far more internal, far more personal. I am almost inviting the viewer into my room. It’s a more vulnerable space, but it also allows for a more direct kind of openness.
I’m curious about your plans after this exhibition.
This exhibition has been traveling to different cities for several years now, and it changes slightly each time, adapting itself to each place. The next stop is the Whitechapel Gallery in London. A new iteration of my teenage room will emerge there when it opens in July. I’m very glad this journey continues.
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