Leonie Bradner, Exhibiting Artist

Fringe Arts Bath 2018 is fast approaching and throughout the remaining weeks I will be posting profiles of the exhibiting artists within Nature Morte. Each artist creates a dynamic reinterpretation of Still Life within a contemporary perspective thus reawakening the perhaps not so Nature ‘Morte’ .

Leonie Bradner

Leonie Bradner grew up in Switzerland, completing BA in Fine Art at the Chelsea College of Art in London and am temporarily living and working in Berlin. Repeatedly experiencing the basic need to establish relationships in places she had none has gradually become a key theme of her work. It is an investigation into the invisible structures of the everyday: the way in which routine engagements with the world make things mean.

"Projections of plants fill the space and tower over the visitors. Strong and proud they stand, until, out of the blue one falters, shudders and shivers. The other greenery responds with a reciprocal shiver and the visitors suddenly find themselves caught between rattling leaves.

Plants form the still backdrop to our everyday: we walk on them in the park, we move around them in the forest and we keep them in pots in our house. They seem motionless but are growing at a pace invisible to the eye. Generally associated with human behavior, the plants’ shiver moves them from a motionless object in the background to an emotive subject in the foreground.

A shiver is by definition involuntary, an uncontrollable motion that provides visual evidence of a reaction to the surrounding. Tomorrow I’ll Be Braver is the journey of two plants caught between standstill and motion, simultaneously stoic, sensitive and alive." Leonie Bradner, 2018.

Bradner’s ambitious installation for me underlines the paradox of the Still Life eloquently, the fragile plants are presented as grandiose figures yet they too shiver hinting at their mortal fate.