Dove Bradshaw (born September 24, 1949) is an American artist whose work integrates natural processes and environmental factors.
She has had residencies at: Pont-Aven School of Contemporary Art, France (teaching and resident artist) Statens Vaerksteder for Kunst and Handvaerark, Gammel Dok, Copenhagen,[1] in conjunction with exhibitions: Elements, Stalke Gallery, Copenhagen, and Anastasi Bradshaw Cage at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Roskilde, Denmark Inspiration from the work of composer John Cage, Bradshaw’s work explores the interaction between natural forces and artistic materials, often incorporating elements of chance.
Her 1969 installation Plein Air involved bicycle wheels and floor-mounted targets in a setting that included mourning doves.
These include salt, stone, acetone, mercury, and sulfur, which undergo gradual transformations through natural processes like erosion and chemical reactions.
In 1976, Bradshaw placed a wall label beside a fire hose at the Metropolitan Museum of Art as part of a work titled Performance.
Bradshaw has been associated with the Process and Art/Science Movements, creating works such as Contingency Paintings that respond to atmospheric conditions and sculptures that document material transformations over time.
[citation needed] In June 2006, Bradshaw was commissioned by Baronessa Lucrezia Durini to execute Radio Rocks as a permanent installation in Bologna.
[citation needed] Galena and pyrite tuners continuously draw local, shortwave and outer space signals echoing the Big Bang.
[5] Silver, which itself is subject to air, light and humidity, became the ground; liver of sulfur the chemical agent; and metal plates, wood, paper, linen, and the wall itself the various supports.
The Notation sculptures consist of copper or bronze cubes or prisms set on marble or limestone and left outdoors to weather.
The Indeterminacy Stones, begun in 1994, consisted of a chunk of pyrite, set atop a piece of marble, and then left outdoors to weather.
Ann Barclay Morgan, writing about work in Sculpture Magazine, commented “…the action of “bleeding”…could be seen as the female life-force in the process of being released.
This material appears to embody a freeing from the confining notion of purity, emblematic of Carrara marble, toward the reality of life suggested by the veining of the marble itself, calling to mind the arteries of the human body that become more visible with age.” The Material/Immaterial Stones, made in Denmark, coupled local spring and aged calcstone and produced a white bleed on a dark stone.
On top of one is a pyrite mixer designed to receive live emissions from Jupiter transmitted via a dedicated line from the radio telescope at Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute in Rosman, North Carolina.
The other two cairns featured fluorite, tourmaline and hematite, acting as non-linear mixers, were computer programmed to attract random local and world-band frequencies.
The salt comes from: The work premiered at Larry Becker Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, 2005 and traveled to SolwayJones, Los Angeles later that year.