Mark Bradford
‘Life Size’ by Mark Bradford
Mark Bradford, Life Size, 2019, Pigmented casting cotton, ink and gouache with letterpress.
Excerpt from The Making of Mark Bradford’s ‘Life Size’:
Ursula: Issue 4, Fall 2019
‘Mark’s studio contacted us in December of 2018, and we started the conversation ‘Life Size’. The studio sent us the body camera, a real one, the kind used by the L.A.P.D. People would come in and have no idea what it was. It’s not readily apparent. It has a camera-like quality to it, but it also kind of feels ominous, like maybe it’s a weapon. That’s the beauty of the piece to me, the mystery of it, which adds to its power. We used the body cam to make a mold from rubber. Using a kind of dense paper pulp called casting cotton, pigmented a very dark black, we spent days packing the molds, using tweezers to get the paper fully into all the crevice details.
It was a very labor-intensive process, especially when you realize that this is an edition of 45, each piece made to be as identical as possible. We have some photos of all of the pieces, lined up in the shop like these strange, gnomic beings. By the end, everyone was covered in black pulp. We sent Bradford the prototype, and he was playing around with it, and he came up with the idea of it being on a sheet made of a stack of paper, seven or eight sheets glued together. He got the idea from putting the camera object on top of a stack of magazines and he liked the structure and heft and feel of it. We used acrylic ink on top of the black paper pulp, to give the feel of the plastic quality of the camera itself.
We learned a lot from this process because it had variables we’d never really encountered before. I don’t know that we’ve ever made a piece that required a reproduction of a mechanical object in the world that is so precise and specific. It was interesting to think about making this armored object, something that’s designed to be shot at and bashed up against things, made to be indestructible, and yet to make it out of something as delicate as paper. I have to say, too: We’re a non-profit, and for us to have a chance to have a hand in making a piece like this that would make a real active difference in people’s lives, especially people who have been so marginalized, was really meaningful.’
