gillian bradshaw-smith : the watery deep
September 6, 2025 - October 11, 2025
Press Release
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(Dallas) Ro2 Art is honored to present The Watery Deep, a solo exhibition by Gillian Bradshaw-Smith—an artist whose remarkable vision and lifelong creative journey have shaped both the art world and the generations who follow in her wake. In this newest body of work, Bradshaw-Smith invites viewers to slip beneath the surface, where illusion and reality, memory and invention, swirl in vibrant interplay.
Composed of twelve intricate paper reliefs, The Watery Deep is both a meditation and a celebration — each cut-out, painted, and layered form a testament to Bradshaw-Smith’s enduring fascination with the threshold between dimensional space and illusion. Like bioluminescent creatures glimpsed in darkness, her shapes twist and pulse across the wall, evoking the mysterious beauty of oceanic depths. These works pulse with life, their edges alive with color and light, offering viewers not only the poetry of transformation, but the joy of artistic play. This exhibition stands as both a milestone and a love letter: a tribute to Bradshaw-Smith’s decades-long exploration of perception, material, and space, and a recognition of her profound and lasting influence on contemporary art in Dallas and beyond. In The Watery Deep, Gillian Bradshaw-Smith invites viewers into a world where illusion swims through the currents of form. Composed of twelve intricate cut-paper reliefs, the works explore the artist’s enduring fascination with the interplay between dimensional space and two-dimensional surface. Using layers of paint, colored pencil, and meticulously sculpted paper, Bradshaw-Smith crafts shapes that seem to interact and float—hovering between what is real and what is imagined. Her process is as meditative as it is meticulous: each shape is rendered with a painter’s touch, then affixed in compositions that feel alive with motion, like underwater creatures caught mid-glide. The result is a series of works that breathe on the wall, simultaneously anchored and in flux. The Watery Deep continues Bradshaw-Smith’s decades-long engagement with materiality, perception, and spatial tension. Through her unique work, she asks us to consider the thresholds we cross when we see—how illusion might not obscure reality, but reveal it. |
About the Artist
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Gillian Bradshaw-Smith’s life and work shimmer at the crossroads of history and invention. Born in India in 1933, during the twilight of the British Raj, she was the daughter of a British admiral whose assignments brought both grandeur and impermanence. After her father’s passing, Bradshaw-Smith, her mother, and her brother set out on a journey both symbolic and real—sailing from India to England on D-Day, threading their way through the tides of a world in transformation.
Educated in England, she immersed herself in the rigorous five-year Fine Art and Painting program at the University of Reading, before teaching art herself and ultimately following her sense of destiny westward. After an initial stop in Dallas, she arrived in New York City, where her creative voice blossomed. At the legendary Cordier & Ekstrom Gallery on Madison Avenue, Bradshaw-Smith exhibited her work alongside and in conversation with artists such as Romare Bearden and Isamu Noguchi—both friends and touchstones—along with Man Ray and other luminaries of modern art. Her practice, ever evolving, drew energy from these creative friendships and the radical spirit of the time. Bradshaw-Smith’s art traverses media and discipline—her more than twenty set designs for the New York Theatre Ballet (many of which remain in use today) are celebrated for their imaginative interplay of depth, color, and movement, echoing Noguchi’s sculptural sensibility and Bearden’s poetic approach to memory and myth. She is also the creative mind behind the beloved Possum Trot toys and the author of Adventures in Toymaking, which further extended her vision into the realms of play and invention. Returning to Dallas in 1995, Bradshaw-Smith became a vital and inspiring presence in the city’s creative community—collaborating with leading designers on architectural elements and, since 2016, exhibiting her most important Texas shows at Ro2 Art. Now in her nineties, she is recognized as a living legend, working daily in her studio, attending more art openings than anyone in Dallas, and continuing to shape the art scene with her intellect, wit, and irrepressible curiosity. Her layered mixed-media works—spanning painting, sculpture, and installation—blur the boundaries between illusion and reality, surface and depth, just as her own life has woven together continents, cultures, and creative breakthroughs. In every way, Gillian Bradshaw-Smith embodies the art of transformation. |
exhibition statement
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"In my twelve-piece series The Watery Deep, I continue to be fascinated with the interplay of painted illusions and real space. Using paint and colored pencil and paper, I work on my cut-out shapes to give them dimension. Then I fasten each piece down to create interacting forms that writhe and twist in real space. The interplay of illusion and reality."
— Gillian Bradshaw-Smith, 2025 |
