Ties That Bind

Elaine Bradford

Cherry on Top

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Bradford is a collector. She mines thrift and antique stores to find discarded pieces of people’s lives. The collectibles, which viewers might find on a shelf in their house, are transformed. For the Museum of Pocket Art exhibition she is embroidering vintage photographs.The found family photos have been repurposed. The pieces in the exhibition become physical representations of mental relationships, real or imagined. The extensions of embroidery represent hopes, thoughts and fears that can bind people together, or tear them apart. The fibers are literal portrayals of being wrapped up in another person, and the distance or closeness that can be created between them. There is a lot about longing and unrequited love.

Elaine Bradford lives and works in Houston, TX. She holds an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts (2003) and a BFA from the University of Texas at Austin (2000). Her work has been included in shows both nationally and internationally. She was one of the founding members BOX 13 ArtSpace, an innovative artist run studio and gallery space in Houston’s East End. She was a resident artist at the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft in 2010. In 2011 she completed a permanent civic art commission for the City of Houston at Vinson Neighborhood Library. Throughout 2017, she worked with Houston poet Sara Cress on a project called Routine Fables, where they created a “sculpture poem” every week of the year, which can be viewed at routinefables.com. Their collaboration will be exhibited at Lawndale Art Center in May 2018.