Beginning in 1969,
Dove Bradshaw, pioneered the use of Indeterminacy in sculpture, painting, performance
and film. By enlisting the unpredictability of life forces she first embraced
Indeterminacy in an installation introducing a pair of mourning doves to bicycle
wheels and floor mounted targets. Some of her other gestures toward Indeterminacy
have involved chance positioning of work, use of materials particularly susceptible
to weather and indoor atmosphere, the gradual erosion of water, or the use of
inherently unstable substances such as acetone, mercury and sulfur. Anticipating
the Museum Interventionist Movement, another ongoing Indeterminate work, titled
Performance, involved her 1976 “claim” of a Metropolitan Museum
of Art fire hose. After mounting a wall label, guerrilla-style, in 1978, she
quietly placed her self published postcard in the museum shop. In recognition
of her gesture, a 1992 official museum postcard was issued, and in 2006 a Dadaist
collector acquired the updated label claiming the hose as a work of art. After
a brief interval the label was donated to the museum which accepted it into
their permanent collection, completing the circle. Bradshaw’s infusion
in the early seventies of scientific exploration has been broadly embraced in
the Science/Art movement, “weathering” works and nature based art,
anticipating the art world’s present focus. In this vein she has made
her silver and chemically activated Contingency Paintings and Zinc and Sulfur
Paintings sensitive to atmospheric conditions. Weather serves as a catalyst
slowly capturing transient metamorphoses in marble, pyrite and copper, in the
Indeterminacy, Material/Immaterial and Notation works. In other works Bradshaw
plots the gradual erosion of salt and stone with water as the transformative
agent, which naturally incorporates time as one of Bradshaw’s most frequently
used materials and one of her key subjects.