“This was not of phantasy, but a thing shewed unto the skryer.”John Dee, Liber Mysteriorum (Spirit Diaries), 1582

Malcolm Bradley’s complex practice sits at the intersection of photography, sculpture and painting. Resisting candid interpretation and formal clarity, Bradley’s jewel-like photographic panels are formally ambiguous, stubbornly slippery and rooted in liminality. Employing an industrial technique called hydrographic printing, Bradley treats the photographic image more as material than a medium. When applied in industry this specific technique allows for the seamless application of an image onto a 3D object like a car part or motorbike helmet. Bradley has adapted this process in the studio, turning it on its head, working only with his hands and a rudimentary water bath. Embracing the inherent glitches and errors that occur throughout this process, the resultant works are gestural, emphasising the skin-like quality of the photographic membrane. There is something reminiscent of the alchemical magic of early analogue photography that bares the natural defects, symptomatic of the conversion of light into an image.

Errors and Vain Reports, Bradley’s first solo show at CORPUS turns its attention to an unrealised film project undertaken by the artist in 2017. The original film was inspired by an email exchange with the experimental musician Joel Graham, an early pioneer of the electronic music scene. Bradley had been lead to believe, by someone claiming to be a close associate, that Graham had died and their subsequent correspondence was shaped by this initial misunderstanding, gravitating towards ideas around the occult and anachronism. Bradley’s recent discovery of the concept of scrying (the act of using a black mirror to communicate with the dead) motivated the artist to revisit this project.

Scrying offers a compelling metaphor for filmmaking itself: an attempt to reach across a void, to imagine and make contact with an unseen subject. A film leads the viewer into an adjacent reality, where something of our own world is reflected back to us. Conceptually, the scrying mirror performs this gesture in reverse. The object itself has a contradictory nature, possessing both an inside and an outside. There are parallels between Bradley’s work, his search for imagery that sits in between representation and abstraction, and how scrying foregrounds the expressive power of low‑fidelity images, their ability to reveal more than the sum of their parts. Bradley has also referred to Georges Didi‑Huberman’s notion of ‘diagonal force’, as a key influence, where meaning emerges obliquely, through fragments, gaps, and partial visibility rather than through clarity or resolution.

The works included in the exhibition are derived from a series of stills Bradley shot on his collection of cameras. The imagery is of varying resolution from high definition video to 16mm film; iPhone footage and screen recordings. Recurring themes emerge in the works such as hands, handheld devices or gestures that Bradley has referred to as indicators or symbols for knowledge that pre-empt language. In Claude Glass Effect, 2025, the same image of a hand delicately holding a phone case is repeated. Certain details are highlighted and there are areas in which the images are cropped or overlapping, emphasising the push and pull between representation and abstraction. Glass and mirrors permeate the works, literally referring to optics and the act of seeing. In Dr Dee’s Mirror, 2025, Bradley had a 3D render made of John Dee’s original black mirror, that is permanently housed in the British Museum. The vitreous and seductive texture of the obsidian is echoed in the reflective quality of the lacquer that coats the panels. In the periphery, hung on the back wall of the gallery, Obsidian, 2025 features a tightly cropped image of a man’s face that resolutely meets the viewer’s gaze. Taken from found footage, the image is distorted by a series of horizontal lines, immediately recognisable as a digital camera’s attempt to capture a static still from analogue moving image. The fixed, concentrated stare of the figure is reminiscent of John Dee’s tireless search for meaning beyond the veil.

Errors and Vain Reports brings together Bradley’s material experimentation and conceptual inquiry into a body of work that favours uncertainty and indirect encounter. Moving between form and concept, image and object, the works operate within a liminal space inviting viewers to linger in states of partial visibility and unresolved knowledge, where meaning emerges not through revelation, but through attention, misrecognition, and the quiet labour of looking.