Jacqueline Bradley

About the work

For the 2026 Canberra Art Biennial, Bradley presents new work with the Australian National Botanic Gardens. In this work, she considers the nature of the site at the gardens, framing public spaces as conglomerates of private moments, and reflecting on the actions of care across species.

Fabricated in steel, recycled timber and cast bronze, the work takes the form of a series of benches sited throughout the Botanic Gardens. With a permit, the artist and her son walked together through the Gardens, picking up pieces along the way – correas dropped and eaten by birds, Jatz half-eaten by toddlers, branches, mulch, seedpods. The benches are embedded with bronze casts of these small collections of objects, alongside tools of care from both the artists experiences in childrearing and from the teams who work with the living collection the botanic Gardens. Cast calico bags used by the Seedbank collection team and the rocket pots used by Botanic Gardens staff to raise plants sit alongside bronze casts of face washers from the artist’s home. These works take functional seating as sites for contemplation; of the site of the garden, the unseen work of the staff who cultivate the garden, and of broader actions of collection, observation and tending.

In 2026, Bradley will also show as part of a group exhibition at the ANBG visitors centre gallery alongside artists Rosalind Lemoh and Anna May Kirk, and as part of the inaugural ARI Banal(e) at the Hyatt, with gallery Sydenham International.

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About the artist

Jacqueline Bradley is an artist and lecturer concerned with bodily relationships to the outdoors. Her practice begins with found objects and plant matter, which are extended through poetic, conceptual and material methodologies. The works shift between intimate and immense; assemblages of ideas, places, times, stories, and experiences, in which meanings are multiple and simultaneous.

Her recent project takes the fruiting tree as a starting point for considering cycles of replication, and utilises glass as an experimental casting medium. Works from this project have been shown at Minerva, Post Office Projects, Canberra Glassworks and Sydenham International. She has delivered projects nationally and internationally, spanning the National Portrait Gallery, European touring exhibition, Futurotextiles and Craft Victoria. Her work is discussed in multiple publications, including Columbia Universities’ Climates: Architecture and the Planetary Imaginary.

She divides her time between her studio at the Canberra Glassworks, on Ngunnawal and Ngambri country, and a lecturing role at the National Art School, Gadigal/Sydney.