Current Work & Writings — Jamie Bradbury

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Jamie Bradbury · Studio journal · October 2026

I work across painting, drawing, sculpture, textiles, sound and moving images. My current projects consider how histories, environments and technologies shape what we see—and what remains outside the frame.

Based in Corner Brook, Newfoundland and Labrador, I bring close observation into conversation with archival research and speculative image-making. This journal gathers recent work, exhibition notes and selected writings from my practice.

The Black Atlantic

Data Missing 2: an icebound vessel interrupted by dense black forms, from The Black Atlantic by Jamie Bradbury

Data Missing 2, from The Black Atlantic.

The Black Atlantic investigates Black maritime histories, ancestral memory and the gaps within historical records. My Jamaican and Newfoundland family histories give this inquiry a personal foundation. AI-generated imagery is tested against archival material, then interrupted through editing and material intervention. Speculation remains visible: the images invite questions about historical evidence rather than claiming to recover an authenticated likeness of the past.

Recent presentations include ArtEvol 2026: A View from Everywhere at Saatchi Gallery, London (3–11 October 2026), presented by London Art Collective, and the group exhibition Reality Check at Michigan State University Museum. The project was also presented in a solo exhibition at CICA Museum in 2025.

Installation view of ArtEvol 2026 at Saatchi Gallery in London

ArtEvol 2026, Saatchi Gallery, London. Exhibition view.

Traces of Us / Vestigia Nostri

Mutualism by Jamie Bradbury: puffins gathered around an entangled humpback whale

Mutualism. Watercolour, 152.4 × 121.9 cm.

These paintings and drawings follow animals through environments altered by human activity. Fishing line, discarded objects and synthetic materials become part of habitats even where people are absent. Drawing on the visual language of natural-history illustration, I explore adaptation, vulnerability and interdependence. In Mutualism, an imagined encounter between puffins and an entangled whale asks what cooperation might look like within a damaged marine environment.

Pleasure Systems

Attention Counterweight: a suspended balance with two vessels, a study for Pleasure Systems

Attention Counterweight. Installation study for Pleasure Systems.

Pleasure Systems is an evolving interdisciplinary project about comfort, surveillance and the organisation of attention. Its movement through seduction, recognition and refusal asks how apparently welcoming environments guide behaviour. Sculptural studies, photographs, moving images and material experiments investigate the distance between measurable engagement and meaningful experience.

Selected writings on art

Writing is part of my studio process: a place to test the assumptions behind an image, examine a technology and consider the cultural histories that materials carry. The following excerpts are drawn from my longer manuscripts, published here under the name James Bradbury.

Synthetic Tides: Promptography Across the Black Atlantic

Selected excerpt · James Bradbury

“How does an image generated by an algorithm, trained on a vast and often biased dataset, speak to the lived realities and historical consciousness of communities that have historically been subjected to misrepresentation and erasure? This is the critical juncture where the technological and the socio-cultural converge.”

This manuscript places AI image-making in dialogue with diasporic history and the question of photographic evidence. It forms part of the ongoing research behind The Black Atlantic.

The Algorithmic Remix: Data, Sampling, and the Afterlife of Culture

Selected excerpt · James Bradbury

“The question then arises: who benefits from this algorithmic consumption? And what are the ethical implications when this consumption mirrors historical patterns of extraction, where the intellectual and cultural property of marginalized groups is readily absorbed and re-purposed by dominant entities, often without attribution, consent, or equitable compensation?”

Here I consider the relationships between sampling, cultural inheritance, authorship and the systems that turn creative work into training data. These questions also inform my investigations of attention and technological power in Pleasure Systems.

Explore the work

View the current portfolio and CV · Follow studio updates on Instagram

For available works, exhibition proposals, commissions or enquiries about the writing, contact the studio.

From the archive: Linger, 2020

This journal also retains work from earlier stages of my practice.

Linger, Jamie Bradbury, 2020

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