Theresa graduated from Nottingham Trent University with a Distinction in MFA Fine Art in 2018 and was selected as a recipient of the University Scholarship Award. Theresa’s research is focused upon feminist practice and theory. She has recently exhibited at G39, Asylum Gallery, Nottingham Contemporary, NN Contemporary, Anise Gallery and Primary. She is a member of Axisweb and has had extensive experience of working as an Artist and within Gallery Education in several organisations, most recently as a Learning Facilitator at Nottingham Contemporary. She has many years experience working with early years, school groups, families and community groups. Her practice encompasses live art, film, performance and sculpture, investigating questions relating to the female body as inherently performic and is supported by research into theorists including Luce Irigaray, Elizabeth Grosz and Rosi Braidotti.
Theresa has recently performed at Disorder Live Art Festival, alongside a group of performance artists from London and the West Midlands, in various venues in Wolverhampton. She recently participated in ‘Summer Lodge’, a residency for thirty artists held each year at Nottingham Trent University. Her work has been published in ‘Emergency Index Vol.8’, a publication documenting performance art practice.
My practice is concerned with the performative nature of femininity and the display and objectification of the female body as commodity within Capitalist society. Utilising a live art, film, performance and sculptural practice to reinforce positive feminist perspectives on the female body. To subvert the prevailing tropes of femininity as prescribed through a patriarchal lens. I am exploring and interrogating social boundaries and acceptable codes of exposure. The appropriate/inappropriate dichotomy in relation to femininity. My work references an anti-aesthetic, a rejection of woman as idealised surface, disrupting the idea of a proper social body and refusing the link to commodity culture.The idea that the female body can be acted upon and coerced by external forces must be disrupted to reframe the body as active and autonomous. By presenting the abjectness of the body, the work both solicits and repels the viewer, a radical acceptance of mess, fluids and flesh are part of feminist resistance.
Email: theresabradbury@gmail.com.
www.axisweb.org/p/TheresaBradbury.
Instagram: theresabradbury_