Dove Bradshaw

Beginning in 1969, Dove Bradshaw, pioneered the use of Indeterminacy in sculpture, painting, performance and film. By enlisting the unpredictability of life forces she first embraced Indeterminacy in an installation introducing a pair of mourning doves to bicycle wheels and floor mounted targets. Some of her other gestures toward Indeterminacy have... involved chance positioning of work, use of materials particularly susceptible to weather and indoor atmosphere, the gradual erosion of water, or the use of inherently unstable substances such as acetone, mercury and sulfur. Anticipating the Museum Interventionist Movement, another ongoing Indeterminate work, titled Performance, involved her 1976 "claim" of a Metropolitan Museum of Art fire hose. After mounting a wall label, guerrilla-style, in 1978, she quietly placed her self published postcard in the museum shop. In recognition of her gesture, a 1992 official museum postcard was issued, and in 2006 a Dadaist collector acquired the updated label claiming the hose as a work of art. After a brief interval the label was donated to the museum which accepted it into their permanent collection, completing the circle. Bradshaw's infusion in the early seventies of scientific exploration has been broadly embraced in the Science/Art movement, "weathering" works and nature based art, anticipating the art world's present focus. In this vein she has made her silver and chemically activated Contingency Paintings and Zinc and Sulfur Paintings sensitive to atmospheric conditions. Weather serves as a catalyst slowly capturing transient metamorphoses in marble, pyrite and copper, in the Indeterminacy, Material/Immaterial and Notation works. In other works Bradshaw plots the gradual erosion of salt and stone with water as the transformative agent, which naturally incorporates time as one of Bradshaw's most frequently used materials and one of her key subjects.Read More