Anna Bradfield is a contemporary painter who combines fine art painting with found object collage to bring new life to both. Her work explores reclaiming and recasting the beauty inherent in found objects by melding them with personal stories through painting, collage and textile. This fresh combination of styles echoes the pluralism of Anna's multicultural background. Half Indian and half English, Anna has a deep appreciation for the richness of diversity and detail.

Anna's new visual language is the product of an ambidextrous brain. Studying Fine Art at Chelsea and Slade Schools of Art in London, she also achieved a Masters degree from Cambridge University. A 20-year career in advertising shaped her love of storytelling and unique perspective as an artist. Through a process of alchemy, Anna's work combines representational images of people and places with the textures that reflect their points of view. The finding adds a magic only possible with the circumstantial nature of reclaimed objects. By using collaged memorabilia and re-appropriated artifacts, Anna's work solicits a journey to experience the emotional worlds of her subjects that reveals itself much like the layers of applied materials.

Anna's practice of searching and responding to what she finds proposes that the work itself is something revealed through a process of discovery, appropriation and assemblage. Anna is always seeking to learn, allowing her to evolve as a person and a painter. Anna's artistic practice and expression of melding the abstract and representational is analogous with her relationship to the two worlds she inhabits as an artist: the spiritual and temporal. Anna's artistic practice is the purest form of her contemplative practice; that as a painter she is a conduit, a channel for the creative force of the universe, Shakti. Anna signs all her paintings in Sanskrit with her full Indian name, Annapurna, a human incarnation of this universal female creative force. 

Community

As a Voices designer for VIDA, Anna creates clothing from her paintings. VIDA IS a global partnership of co-creators that provides literacy programs for makers in Pakistan. 

Anna brings her passion for working with children and underserved communities to practicing and teaching art in progressive, inspiring ways.