Victoria Bradley
(Apex, NC)

Paper Tiger, Acrylic Paint on antique wallpaper, 21" x 25"

Painted on a fragment of antique French wallpaper, this acrylic nude emerges from a surface shaped by time. Once tightly rolled for over a century, the paper was gently coaxed open before painting. Its faded florals and worn texture hold a figure that carries both vulnerability and strength.

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.