Victoria Bradley
(Apex, NC)

The Ache + Thrill of Becoming, Gouache on lithograph, 22" x 16"

Painted on an antique butterfly lithograph, this gouache nude explores the fragile space between vulnerability and emergence. The figure rests lightly against the historic print, embodying transformation—grieving what has fallen away while gathering the courage to step into something new.

My work centers on the nude figure as a site of vulnerability, memory, and endurance. I paint and draw directly onto antique papers—lithographs, book covers, maps, medical ephemera—surfaces that already carry the weight of time. These materials are not backdrops but collaborators, shaping how the figure is held, revealed, or resisted. The handmade mark is essential to my process. I work slowly and intuitively, allowing gesture, erasure, and restraint to guide the image rather than idealization or narrative. The figures are often softened, cropped, or partially unresolved, emphasizing presence over perfection. In placing contemporary bodies onto historical surfaces, I am interested in how the nude can exist without performance—neither symbolic nor eroticized, but human. These works explore the tension between fragility and strength, asking what it means to inhabit a body in the present while carrying the past forward.