About the work

I explore the ideas of memory, absence, mortality, and the passage of time in my prints. Our memories are naturally inconsistent and fleeting; it’s impossible to remember everything in our lives clearly, especially as we age. Important memories move from short-term memory to long-term memory.

Every time we recall memories from our long-term memory, in particular, some of the information either gets lost in the retrieval or our brains fill in small gaps with other memories, resulting in a slightly different and ever-changing ‘false’ memory. Through those countless retrievals, our memories of those precious moments loses their ‘truth’ as our brains start to fill in the blanks with other memories or narratives that aren’t consistent with what really happened.

My artistic process starts with identifying my sources; I pull my inspiration from family photo albums, dating back to the 1950s and 60s. I make photocopies of the pictures and physically cut out pieces of the image to strip it of its details, which speaks to the absence, the mortality of people/places, and the fleetingness of memories. I end my process by transferring the scraps onto a new piece of paper, using lacquer thinner, a photo transfer chemical. 

In consequence of those countless retrievals, our memories of moments in time lose their ‘truth’ as our brains start to fill in the blanks with other memories. Through printmaking, my prints become immensely abstracted from their original beginning as a photograph, which shows the inconsistent and ephemeral side of our memories. 

About the artist

Natalie Bradford is a recent graduate of Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, MI She has a degree in Fine Art with an emphasis in printmaking. She splits her time between Kalamazoo and Detroit and exhibits work locally at WMU and around Michigan’s west side. She has been published in numerous international contemporary art magazines such as Average Art Magazine, Exclamation Magazine, Empty Mirror, and many others. Her work is autobiographical and oftentimes deal with themes of absence, memory, temporality, and nostalgia. For art/business inquiries, she can be reached at nataliebradford75@gmail.com, original artwork can be purchased at https://www.etsy.com/shop/nataliebradfordart, and her online portfolios can be found at nataliebradford75.wixsite.com/mysite and https://linktr.ee/natalie.bradford.