Paige Bradley created one of the most striking sculptures I’ve seen in recent times. Her masterpiece, entitled Expansion, is a beautiful woman seeking inner piece but fractured and bleeding with light.
“From the moment we are born, the world tends to have a container already built for us to fit inside: a social security number, a gender, a race, a profession,” says Bradley. “I ponder if we are more defined by the container we are in than what we are inside. Would we recognize ourselves if we could expand beyond our bodies?”
Her work is full of dichotomies: both the beautiful and the ugly, the liberated and the contained, the falling and the floating. She is always in control of form but not imprisoned by its literally. The subject matter becomes the most important — not narrowly feminist, but rather humanistic betrayals of modern emotion.
Bradley knew she would be an artist by the age of nine. She started drawing nude models by the age of ten, and by fifteen was studying intensely at university campuses during the summer months. After studying at Pepperdine University, Paige spent a year in Florence, Italy with the university’s study program. There, she took classes at the Florence Academy of Art which included art history. She went on to continue her education at the prestigious Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.