In 1971 Bradshaw made 2v0, (the Square Root of Zero), a klepsydra or water –clock, which she had conceived along the lines of an hourglass, but using acetone instead of sand. Again she did not clearly think of it as an artwork at the time, but as an invention.

2v0, glass, acetone, 2 ½ x 5 x 2 ½ in.

With the help of a technician at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology she came up with a design inspired by the infinity sign not unlike the double vessels portraying the male and female principles (mercury and sulfur) illustrated in alchemical manuals. If regarded vertically, it functions as a clock; if horizontally, as a level. Since there are no markings on the glass and acetone is heat-sensitive, its readings are undependable – indeterminate in the epistemological sense. The nonsensical reportage of the piece implies that the space-time reality it measures is continually changing and hence indeterminate. The idea of a measuring device that combines time and space was to be a major theme of Bradshaw’s later works in which unpredictable changes in a spatial field take place over time.

These three pieces of her student years – the doves, the broken eggshells, the water clock/level – were the seed s from which her conscious pursuit of an art of indeterminacy would grow.

Three years later, in 1974, Bradshaw met William Anastasi, one of the founders of classical Conceptualism, with whom she established a life partnership that is still fruitfully in effect. Meeting Anastasi had a lot to do with moving Bradshaw increasingly away from the heavy earthiness of ceramics and into Conceptualism. In 1979 for example, she made several pieces in which she hammered a nail partway into a wall, then threw at it a pancake-shaped disc of wet clay; sometimes it caught on the nail and hung there, sometimes it caught on the nail, ripped, and fell in shreds to the floor. The opening of the crack the loosening of the grid, was underway. The fabled solidity of ceramic was giving way to ephemerality. The daytime logic of the solid object was becoming a night-time logic of indeterminacy and surprise.

Bye Bye Product 1975) is a used-up and flattened gallon paint can heavily encrusted by its former contents, its lid still in place, evidently run over by a heavy vehicle. The work relates to the idea of focusing on the process of making art rather than the resultant artwork – for example, Yves Klein’s exhibition of the rollers he had used to make paintings rather than the paintings themselves (Untitled Sculpture S 7, 1962). A process is necessarily involved in change, while its product often appears static.

2v0 (Square Root of Zero, 1971) is the clock and level described earlier.

Being (1969) was the nest that the doves had made in her studio fifteen years before – in effect a work of art made by another species, a radical closing of the traditional breach between nature and culture.

Pose (proposal for a film) (1977) is a pair of Polaroid photographs that became the basis for a treatment for a split-screen film. Bradshaw photographed Anastasi asleep, then after awakened asked him to adopt the same position and photographed him again. The pictures are virtual replicas, but one is art, the other life. The viewer is gazing across the art-life disjunction.

Without Title, 1977, wood, glass, mat board, news print, presstype, 8 5/8 x 12 x 11 5/8 in.

Without Title (1977) is a wooden frame containing a piece of news print mounted on mat board behind glass. The parameters of the work are space and time interacting in a material. Each material was evaluated and labeled by a conservator with the number of years it could be expected to endure seemingly unchanged: two years for the newsprint, 100 years for the mat board, and so on. The piece flaunts the ephemerality of its materials as its essence, negating the artist’s traditional desire to attain eternality.

Periphery, 1979, laminated SX 70 Polaroids, presstype, metal rings, 6 x 6 x 2 in.

Periphery (1979) is a photographic record of a walk Bradshaw took around the perimeter of Manhattan Island. She began at the base of the George Washington Bridge and headed north along the Hudson River. Focusing her camera on the farthest visible point of land extending into water, she photographed it, then walked to that point. There she would repeat the process, turn and shoot her last point of departure, then move on again. The resulting 92 photographs were bound with rings so that there was neither beginning nor end; one could start at any point and recreate the walk around the island in one direction or the other. It is performative photography – human, landscape and camera interacting to create a record.

In Dazzle Camouflage (1983) Bradshaw covered the walls of Time and Space Limited, an experimental theater in Manhattan, with a pattern of camouflage obtained from the United States Navy. The pattern, used to make ships unidentifiable from a distance, involves five colors (black, white, light grey, dark grey and blue) applied in camouflage style. It is a direct attack on the Law of Identity, positing an entity outside definition, or at least temporarily removed from it by the elusiveness of perception. Within the space, now made indeterminate by its bewildering camouflage, the director developed a performance based on it. The camouflage plan and installation shots were subsequently exhibited.

Painting (1978) consists of dried paint scrolled from glass. The theme of detritus, or used materials, combines with the idea of emphasizing process rather than product. Paint itself becomes a tiny sculpture.

TUPRSECLU (1978) is a set of transparent marbles marked with those letters and exhibited in a transparent box; the viewer shakes the box and randomly produces words or suggestions of words, perhaps an anagram. The product remains an undetermined “sculpture” until the viewer’s intervention.

50% Better (1979) was a performance in which Bradshaw, dressed as a nun, sat on a chair in Grand Central Station in New York for two days, holding an alms bowl for donations from passersby. On the first day she sat with a neutral expression, on the second was a warm smile. The collection of the second day was 50% greater than that of the first. Again the process was the point; there was no product except photographs (the money was given to charity).

Cliché (1980) is a rubber stamp presenting the word “cliché”. The inked stamp was exhibited attached to a pedestal with a string, with instructions to use it. The word cliché was stamped all over the pedestal. Audience participation and tautology were combined with the reversal of the value of originality.

The Utica College show focused on the conceputalist thread in Bradshaw’s work from 1969 to 1984. A number of valuable ideas involving indeterminacy had been laid down in her work during those years, but she was awake for other possibilities that would help her move on. Her inherent draughtsman’s ability lay invitingly available yet seemed to offer no further advance. How easy it would be for someone who had facility to just go on doing it forever! One thinks of Picasso once saying that his biggest problem was learning not to draw. In a similar vein, Bradshaw was inclined to venture out of conventional craftsmanship and representation into the free space where one could use any material or style. For the rest of the ‘80s she studied the issue of how to work in two dimensions without representation. This investigation unfolded in four stages, each represented by an exhibition.

In Collages on Wood, 1986, Bradshaw dissected mathematical, architectural and medical diagrams and transferred selected images onto wood. There were eight in the show, each 17” x 14 “ – complex images that were semi-abstract and semi-scientific – somewhat in the Duchampian tradition of moving art away form the realm of religion and closer to that of science. In terms of anti-art, they block the urge toward draughtsmanly expressiveness through the use of appropriation. (One of them later became the set for a performance of Merce Cunningham Dance Company, Fabrications, 1987.

While learning how not to draw, Bradshaw found a child’s composition book that contained images made with household materials like fingernail polish remover. It effectively merged art and life. She gathered children’s drawings from various sources – a Harlem daycare center, a Danish kindergarten, and some a friend brought from Kenya. She manipulated these by projecting a chance selection on to vellum, painting on the vellum with a spatula through the light of the slide projection with oil, then cutting the oil with crayons and graphite and obliterating areas with erasers melted in medium.

In 1988 a second exhibition at Utica College, Dove Bradshaw, contained twenty-three oil paintings on vellum. Painterly brushwork was combined with intense coloration to affect a picture of an interior landscape. Some showed childlike renditions of faces; these egg-like shapes resumed the vanitas theme suggested primordial intuitions of birth and the gradual articulation of life-forms.

Concurrently, with a related show (Paintings, 1988) Bradshaw opened the Sandra Gering Gallery in New York, where she would exhibit her work for next thirteen years. In 1989, in her second show at Gering, Bradshaw exhibited a full recreation of the 1969 dove installation from her studio, under the title Plain Air. There were also works on unprocessed vellum (calf-skin with the hair still on). Bradshaw chose one of the liver-spots on the calf-skin and remade it in silver leaf, placing it elsewhere by chance. In another room two cast eggshells – one bronze, the other silver – lay on a metal table. The show relentlessly critiqued the tradition of opposition between nature and culture.

The next exhibition at Gering, Full,1991,was named after a red monochrome canvas that Bradshaw freshly dusted with red pigment at the start of the show, then left to change as it would. The piece, as John Cage observed, “is willing to give of itself and to change itself and without losing itself.” The monochrome’s metaphysical eternality is merging with ephemerality. A red-pigmented thorn exhibited nearby heightened the focus, it was as if the painting had become a sculpture, losing its generality and becoming small precise, and painful.

Bradshaw’s third show with Gering, Contingency, 1993, began the series of three breakthroughs that would most clearly constitute the passage through the crack. She had begun making what she calls Contingency works in 1984 and had included one in her first Utica Show. Over the next few years they developed in several directions. The most basic form is silver-leafed paper or canvas onto which a substance called liver of sulfur is poured or brushed. Liver of sulfur is a 17th century term which is still used (the modern scientific term is sulfurated potash). It is made up of various liver-colored substances including metallic sulfides and compounds of a metal or of sulfur with an alkali. As a chemistry book of 1800 states, “You fuse together equal parts of sulphur and alkali…and the result would be a solid mass…which has a considerable resemblance to the liver of certain animals.” Dissolved in water, it is used to patinate or oxidize silver.

When this agent is applied to silver, the surface becomes unstable, changing in various ways in response to ambient humidity and heat. In Contingency Paintings Bradshaw brushes the whole surface with liver of sulfur; in Contingency Pours she pours it and lets it spread and pool as gravity dictates. Upon contact the silver turns a brilliant gold, then gets turquoise hues in a pitted or streaked form, then deep blue, then a greenish color, and eventually an iridized black. The initial chemical reaction is most noticeable, but it keeps going at a slower rate thereafter, and never stops. The effect is indeterminate in the sense that the result is unpredictable and often surprising. The mottled pattern is ephemeral or constantly changing and resembles the effects of expressionist painting, often with a somber look as of natural processes that on at night in the dark while people sleep unawares.

Here Bradshaw seems to have found an enduring mode of indeterminacy beyond Cage’s idea of the event which remains indeterminate until it happens. The flux produced by chemical ferment in a Contingency painting never ends unless the painting itself is destroyed.

It has a claim to actual ontological indeterminacy. It will continue to document the process of change in the face of all claimed certainties. The idea was carried over into outdoor sculptures that are likewise susceptible to atmospheric changes, beginning with a copper wall piece Passion, 1993) and land sculptures employing a copper cube (Notation I, 1999). For the indoor work she has treated the copper with vinegar, ammonium chloride, copper sulfate and urine to set of the reaction ; for the outdoor work she leaves it to the weather.

The Gering exhibition Contingcncy, 1993, contained five works of liver of sulfur on silvered canvas. The size of the support surface was determined by the reach of the artist’s outstretched arms, horizontally and vertically. They were executed outdoors so the outdoor environment would stamp itself on the chemical reaction. The pieces were titled by the dates when they were made. And one critic’s feelings about their poetic evocations of the seasons illustrates the parallel with the way expressionist painting is sometimes received; “May 14, 1992, has the rich copper colors of a warm sunset, December 24, 1992 has the winter chill in its grey coloring, while October 18, 1992, with its peeling surface, calls to mind the ragged trees of autumn.” This critic also observes, “Like a potter putting newly glazed ceramics into a kiln, Bradshaw has no way of knowing exactly what the final product will be.” “Bradshaw, “ observes another critic, “has made pieces that embrace what most art shuns; the inevitable chemical changes that fade cave paintings, crack and crumble frescoes, darken oils to obscurity.”

The reversal of values involved can be appreciated through a comparison with the fate of some of Mark Rothko’s paintings. In the late 1960s, while making the black, maroon and brown monochromes for the Rothko Chapel in Houston, Texas, the artist was clearly aiming at the capture of the eternal in the paintings. In a conversation about them he remarked to a visitor, “I am trying to convey the infinity of death”; when his guest said, “Don’t you mean the eternality?” Roth replied, “OK, the eternality.” Yet in preparing the paint he contradictorily threw in some organic matter, specifically egg yolks. This was tantamount to Bradshaw’s using the liver of sulfur. Soon after the paintings were hung in the Chapel they could be seen changing as the egg-yolk spoiled. But change was the opposite of what was desired. The eternality of death was supposed to be static. Conservators tried to arrest the process of change – to little avail. Now the difference between the paintings as they originally appeared and as they appear today is a somewhat hidden fact about the work. In Bradshaw’s Contingency Paintings, on the contrary, the artist deliberately triggered the process of change and it is that process, far from hidden, that is the centerpiece of the work. The title, Contingency points to this fact; Rothko’s paintings were supposed to be absolute, not contingent.

With a sense of deferring to nature, Bradshaw happily yields control to the changing atmospheric conditions nature provides, whatever they might be. In desire for mastery that was basic to Modernism yields to an acceptance of the unexpected. In a broader sense the idea of contingency leads to a quasi-metaphysical complex which Buddhist tradition calls conditioned co-production (Sanskrit, pratitya-samutpada) – meaning that things come into existence in causal net which are continually shifting as they themselves are similarly contingent, and the factors they are contingent upon are also contingent, and so on. The whole vast network of phenomena is seen as arising not from essences (or fixed identities) but from temporary contingencies that are always in a state of flux and therefore are without identity or essence or inner truth; everything, in other words, is both ephemeral and indeterminate. As Aristotle remarked in the Metaphysics. “Nothing is true of what is changing.” So the Contingency works are at the entrance, as it were, to the crack between the world of the daytime and night-time logicians. By implication they reject both the Law of Identity and the Law of the Excluded Middle. They affirm change, made possible by the lack of fixed essence. One critic appropriately brought up Matthew Arnold’s lines, “Change and decay in all around I see;/O thou who changest not, abide with me.” And observed that “Bradshaw’s work seems made to demonstrate that any search for what ‘changest not’ is doomed to failure.”

Bradshaw did not devise the Contingency works with the model of alchemy in mind yet they seem virtually late instances of that tradition. Alchemy was a pre-modern laboratory science that attempted to induce changes in metals by the application of chemical substances. Similarly in the Contingency series a process of change takes place in a metal due to an applied chemical. Furthermore, liver of sulfur is a compound of sulfur, and sulfur is one of the three substances of alchemy – usually regarded as the most important. It is found in many minerals and ores (especially iron pyrites, which are used extensively by Bradshaw). It occurs in plants, animals, and meteorites. It burns with a blue flame and is what the Bible call brimstone.

According to one alchemical theory all physical substances are made up of differing combinations of three elements, sulfur, salt and mercury. Bradshaw has worked with all three. In 1993, for example, she called a tiny bottle containing seven drops of mercury Indeterminacy. In the S Paintings, a series begun in 1996, powdered sulfur was bonded with varnish, the yellow surface remaining powdery and subject to change, like the surface of the red monochrome Full. Bradshaw’s Contingency works symbolically sum up the alchemical process; the oxidation of the silver deposits salt on the surface. Sulfur, salt, and silver are all involved.

Since, according to some forms of alchemical theory, silver, salt and mercury are the components of all things, by properly manipulating them one should be able to produce any other substance, such as gold or silver. A Medieval Arabic alchemist known as Pseudo-Geber “taught that the imperfect metals were to be perfected or cured by the application of ‘medicines.’ “ One such medicine was called “philosophical sulfur.” Bradshaw’s Contingency works enact an analogue of this process. But there is more than material change at issue. The process has spiritual implications.

The 16th century alchemist Paracelsus simply called sulfur the soul. As Jung wrote in the Mysterium Conjunctionis, his long reverie on the spiritual implications of alchemy, “Sulphur is a spiritual or psychic substance of universal import…Sulphur is the soul not only of metals but of all living things.” In Bradshaw’s analogue, liver of sulfur acts as the inner soul of matter enlivening it for transformation. For sulfur has both chthonic and heavenly aspects. The Turba Philosophorum, a Medieval Latin alchemical treatise, says, “The soul is…the ‘hidden part (occultum) of the sulphur’,” and also that “Sulphur is a shining heavenly being.” Brimstone’s association with hell-fire prepares us for the Turba’s remark that “The little power of the sulfur is sufficient to consume a strong body.” It is this power that the alchemist summons and that Bradshaw invokes by analogy in her works as the liver of sulfur transforms the silver into artwork.

John Cage, who owned Contingency works, saw another spiritual and ethical content in them. “If I, so to speak, change with [the painting],” he remarked, “then I can change with the world that I’m living in, which is doing the same thing.” Contemplating the indeterminacy of the changing painting sharpened his awareness of his own indeterminacy and brought him into tune with it.

The show Indeterminacy, 1995 (the next major show at Gering’s), was a breakthrough that would lead Bradshaw to a full confrontation with the themes of sculpture, ephemerality, indeterminacy, and alchemy. In the procedure, which evolved from the Contingency process, outdoor sculptures of unhewn stone are “activated” or engaged in chemical change. One stone of a type which is prone to leach out chemicals, usually pyrite, is placed on top of a receiver stone, usually limestone or white marble. At this point the arrangement recalls something dedicated on an altar, offering itself for transformation. Placed out of doors, accessible to the rain, the upper stone leaches streaks and bands of chemical color onto the lower one. They are, as it were, paintings made by nature. In preparation for the Gering show three one-ton pairings were exposed to the elements for half a year; the pyrite stained the marble with rust-colored patterns that recalled the drips or streaks of expressionist painting.

Earlier that year a related work was shown at the Pier Art Center in the Orkney Islands. A boulder of Scottish sandstone was brought up from the beach. A seventy pound piece of pyrite was placed on top. Unlike the constituents of the Contingency works, the pyrite will dwindle away to nothing in 50 - 100 years. At that point the involvement in flux, which entails indeterminacy on Aristotle’s principle, would come to an end in that particular form, though the stone with its stain would continue to undergo change in slower and less visible ways.
In 1998 the exhibition Dove Bradshaw, curated by Julie Lazar at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, included three of these works. As one critic remarked, they “ironically dissolve the concepts of immutability and permanence usually associated with stone.” The works “allude through their material substance to the legendary legacy of sculptural medium, established by the Greeks and Romans,” but at the same time they “underscore the perishable and mutational nature of marble, and by implication of the artistic canon, eroding confidence in its allegedly formidable and timeless essence.”

Like her Contingency works, Bradshaw’s Indeterminacy Stones participate in the alchemical paradigm. The process in which one stone touches another and creates a change in it is the analogous to the idea of the Philosopher’s Stone, which, according to alchemical legend, has the ability to change the state of other stones by touching them. So in the Indeterminacy stones the pyrite performs an analogue to the function of the Philosopher’s Stone. (That pyrite is also known as Fool’s Gold suggests an ironical critique of the alchemical approach).

The idea of the artist as alchemist was most clearly enunciated by Yves Klein in his description of himself as a “midwife” to nature – a term which some medieval alchemists applied to themselves. In his Twelve Keys, the alchemist and Benedictine monk “Basil Valentine,” who for his achievements in the chemical sphere has been given the title of Father of Modern Chemistry, declared, “The minerals are hidden in the womb of the earth and nourished by her with the spirit which she receives from above.” This spirit may be the Turba’s “philosophical sulphur,” sulphur as a “shining heavenly being,” the spirit of the sky which, in a cosmic marriage, impregnates the earth.

By his chemical manipulations, then, “The alchemist strove to assist Nature in her gold-making.” As the midwife he was assisting Mother Earth to give birth to the perfected element that was gestating within her. Left to herself, she would sooner or later give birth to it anyway, but that might take geological ages. The alchemist hoped by his laboratory procedures to hasten the parturition in hopes of making the stone available within his lifetime.

Klein performed as midwife when, for example, he made paintings by sifting powdered pigment into the air and inviting wind and rain to dispose it upon the canvas. In so doing he saw himself as intervening in the process of nature and midwifing a birth. The idea is not dissimilar to these words of a Danish critic commenting on Bradshaw’s work: “The meeting between the materials is the essential… Bradshaw facilitates the meeting, but after that, the work is out of her hands. It is nature that takes over…” Among contemporary painters, Sigmar Polke has similarly produced paintings with elements of volatile chemical coating that will change in response to changes in ambient temperature and humidity. Unlike Bradshaw’s roughly contemporaneous works, in which the process continues to advance, these works of Polke’s may return to the same visual condition again and again, as the same climatic conditions return. In his use of such methods there is a certain objection to the separation of culture from nature, an affirmation of nature as the goal rather than the raw material.

John Cage meant something similar about the dichotomy between nature and culture when he observed of the use of chance in art-making that an unforeseen action or effect “is not concerned with its excuse. Like the land, like the air, it needs none.” The artwork, then, that has become involved in natural process through chance or other strategies has the self-validating stature of a natural entity, a thing which is without purpose, which simply exists as itself without reference to or implication of anything else.

The third of Bradshaw’ breakthroughs as midwife to nature comprised two related series, Negative Ions and Waterstones. The Negative Ion works were first shown in the Sandra Gering/Linda Kirkland concurrent exhibits Irrational Numbers, 1998, a complex gathering of Bradshaw’s recent series into a single presentation which showed their inner unity. Gering had four Negative Ion works – rock-salt crystalline boulders (the largest about a quarter of a ton) onto which water dripped from hanging laboratory vessels with regulating valves. At about five drops per minute the salt erodes about two inches a month in conformations that are unpredictable – indeterminate until they have occurred. Another work in the Gering show was Contingency [Book] (1995-97). This is Bradshaw’s principal bookwork to date, consisting of seven large linen pages, silvered on both sides, four of which had been stacked for two years interleaved with other works treated with liver of sulfur. The chemistry from those other works invaded the new silvered sheets and worked on them. The seven leaves were then bound together, each still in the process of oxidation. As viewers turn pages in the gallery the process is accelerated briefly as each one is exposed to air, light, and human touch. Closed, the pages re-engage in the process of becoming each other.

The Kirkland exhibition had four Indeterminacy Stones (Indeterminacy I-IV, 1997). Each was a 12 inch limestone cube toped with a smaller chunk of pyrite which was somewhat diminished after a year of weathering. Each diminished pyrite rested centered in its stain. 2v0, the clock/level, crazily mirrored and measured the space-time transformation going on. To reveal the early stages of their chemical development, Bradshaw treated four Contingency Pours with a shot of liver of sulfur the night before the opening.

Like the Contingency Paintings, the Negative Ion works occurred in several forms. In some, the water dripped on poured heaps of road salt instead of salt-boulders. Another series, using limestone blocks instead of rock-rock salt were called Waterstones. In these works (in Indeterminacy I-IV) the blocks are honed cubes.

Again there is an interesting kinship with the works of Robert Smithson, reflecting issues alive in the culture in general. Smithson had proposed looking at the decayed state of structures and environments when they are chaotically falling apart rather than the stage at which they seem rigid, stable, and under control. As he formulated it, that stage shows the process of entropy, or “energy drain.” He seems to have felt that the ethical meaning of entropy is that everything will always lose energy and disperse and that we should accept and even celebrate this hard news. This was a part of the post-Modern concentration on ephemerality. Similarly, Bradshaw’s Contingency, Indeterminacy and Negative Ion/Waterstone paintings and sculptures all focus attention on the ongoing process of disintegration. (Smithson’s practice of showing untrimmed stones in galleries – sometimes boulders of rock salt – also lies in the art historical background of these shows, as does his tendency to conflate art and science.) but there are still deeper spiritual implications to the theme of disintegration, as the entropy theory clearly bears a resemblance to Taoist thought.

The Toa means “the way”. According to the Tao Tê Ching, the classic text attributed to Lao Tzu, the way may also be called the Valley Spirit or the water Spirit or the Mysterious Female. The nature of the water Spirit is that it seeks the low ground. When water has reached the lowest point, it has returned to the state of the Uncarved Block, to the Mysterious Female. Bradshaw, then is using the way, or the Water Spirit, in both the Indeterminacy Stones and the Waterstones; the liquid flows downward eating away the rock as it seeks the lowest place.

The essence of the Way is ceding control, holding oneself back from intervention as much as possible. In terms of art, this is anecdotally embodied in the story of Hokusai dipping a chicken’s claws in ink and letting it run across the page. Similarly, Bradshaw lets the pyrite leach onto the limestone. She has said, in reference to her role with her materials, “I like to withdraw,” meaning that after setting up the situation she lets the forces of nature take charge and go their own way. Though not the western style, this is nevertheless a strategy for control. As the Tao Tê Ching says, “The sage’s way is to act without striving” (LXXXI). “Those that would gain what is under heaven by tampering with it – I have seen that they do not succeed” (XXXIX). Cage was referring to something like Bradshaw’s “withdrawal” when he observed, “Morton Feldman said that when he composed he was dead.” Sol LeWitt must have had something similar in mind when in Sentences he says, “The artist’s will is secondary to the process he initiates…”

A basic image in Taoism is water’s ability to wear away stone – a foundational point of Bradshaw’s Indeterminacy, Negative Ion, and Waterstone works. “Nothing under heaven is softer or more yielding than water, “ says Lao Tzu, “but when it attacks things hard and resistant there is not one of them that can prevail” (LXXVIII). A modern text on Taoist art observes that every thing is characterized by perpetual motion because everything is infused with a need to return to the Tao; dripping water, for example, is seeking to return to the Tao. This relationship is encapsulated in the Taoist term for landscape painting, shan-shui, mountain-water.

“The term for landscape,” a modern scholar writes, “…is…symbolic of the [constant interaction of the] Yang and the Yin, in turn come through in Taoist alchemy as mercury and sulfur, the male and the female of the cosmic marriage. Awareness of this fact was supposed to inculcate in the artist painting a shan-shui “a worshipful attitude, making it a ritual act of reverence in praise of the harmony of Heaven and Earth.”

There seems a dualism in yang and yin, yet the Tao Tê Ching says they “produce oneness” and in the Taoist painting tradition this was called i-hua (one-painting or painting the oneness). Extrapolating from this idea one could say that Bradshaw’s Waterstones are an attempt to paint the oneness. The disintegrated state of entropy, the eating of water into stone, are symbols of dialectical reality, the abandonment of Identity and Excluded Middle –a glimpse of the other side of the crack.

Reflecting on these series of works Bradshaw realized that she was, in effect, exhibiting materials as themselves, without working them extensively – salt, stone, sulfur, water, mercury. An extreme example is Material/Immaterial (2000), a series of seven out of a projected fifteen works erected in the Museum of Contemporary Art, Roskilde, Denmark, based on the Ryoanji temple Garden in Kyoto, Japan. Here Bradshaw used a locally available stone, pairing spring and aged calcspar, rendering a white bleed onto a dark receiver stone, reversing the palette of the pyrite-on-marble pairs.

The next step in the increasingly materialist project involved focusing on the idea of elements, and how they impact upon the belief in identity or the self. As certain philosophers have observed, if the self can be broken down into impersonal entities that leave nothing unaccounted for, then the idea of the essential identity of the person has been disproved: When the elements involved in the self are separated, it simply ceases to seem to exist. Bradshaw exhibited the elements found in the human body under the title Self Interest (1999). Using her 100 pound body as the reference, Bradshaw calculated the proportion of weight each element would have in a 100 pound combination, putting each in an appropriately sized laboratory flask. They were exhibited in a random distribution on a glass table. A related work is a photograph of a model’s body on which the names of the elements are printed in their proper proportions, in diminishing order.

Self Interest functions as a synthesis of earlier tendencies: the use of laboratory flasks, the continuation of the alchemical thread, and the idea of moving art closer to the realm of science. It echoes the vanitas theme by denying the idea of the self as an essence. It breaks objects and selves down into fragments, thus denying identity or stressing its tendency to change. Yet, though it sums up numerous themes involved with the long-term development of Bradshaw’s work, it has a new look; it is specifically and uniquely itself.

This moment in Bradshaw’s oeuvre may be called mid-career. The first step toward indeterminacy occurred early in her development. Since then she has followed the path with concentration and integrity. Over 30 years she has worked out a synthesis of two diverging tendencies: on the one hand, the earthy, material, and heavy aspect of traditional sculpture; on the other the identity-dodging or shape-shifting of Conceptual Art. In the process she has passed incrementally through the opening that led from the rigid grid of logic in the flowing indeterminacy of dialectic. Step by step, this quest has brought a full-throated voice into the open, conscious of itself and dedicated to working out its own implications.

At mid-career Bradshaw’s oeuvre is uniquely her own and bears little overt resemblance to the work of any other artist. Still, it is not an outsider oeuvre but works with themes and motifs that have occupied much Modern and contemporary art and culture. It dwells, for example, on the project of tactically narrowing the traditional breaches between culture and nature, art and life. In this respect it could be contextualized among Later Modernists such as John Cage or Yves Klein (both discussed earlier) or Jannis Kournells (who, among many other parallels, exhibited a living parrot as part of an installation in 1967). Bradshaw’s still growing and evolving oeuvre relates meaningfully to the works of several artists more or less of her generation including Sigmar Polke (who has incorporated nature into the matrix of culture in many ways, some mentioned earlier), Kiki Smith (who, among other points of resemblance, exhibited brass castings of various birds’ eggs in 1998), Meg Webster (whose works of the 1980s were always involved with natural processes and elements), and others.

In an age when nature and culture have seemed dangerously out of harmony with one another, Dove Bradshaw and these other artists have dedicated themselves to overleaping the forbidden Middle – that no man’s land between nature and culture, life and art. Their hope is to repair the breach between the human project of civilization and nature’s project of just being itself. Dove Bradshaw’s work spiritedly affirms both these forces. Thanks in part to these efforts, today the self-sufficiency of nature has become a part of the work of civilization, or the other way around. There seems no other way to continue life upon the earth.