Later painting: swimmers and other figurative works
Bradford's later work (e.g., her "Fear of Waves" exhibition, 2016) has evolved toward larger, more vibrant work, that Yau writes "transform[s] the whimsical into the catastrophic, its polar opposite, without losing [its] offhand humor." Often painted in water-soluble acrylic—ideal for mimicking the effects of water in images of swimmers, bathers and surfers—these paintings take more formal risks, with complex compositions of multiple figures and divided grounds of otherworldly, nocturnal planetary-oceanic environments.
In the near-monochrome painting Blue Swimmers (2015), Bradford submerges and crops ghostly, awkwardly human figures within washes of blue or green, complicating figure-ground relationships while alluding to themes of birth, life, and possibly, death. Other paintings, like the diagonally divided, vertical Fear of Waves (2016), introduce an element of uncertainty or calamity whose specific threat and outcome remains a mystery; the bird's-eye view work depicts a crowd of swimmers fleeing giant, leftward-moving waves toward through a turquoise impasto, conveying a sense of insignificance against the unfathomable.
Critics such as Lilly Wei identify Bradford's "Friends and Strangers" (2018) and "Legs and Stripes" (2019) exhibitions as departures in terms of palette, process and collective themes, such as race, sexuality, gender and identity. The former shows were characterized by vibrant pinks, magentas, purples and yellows, directly drawn thick outline, monumental scale, and the use of gesture and facial direction rather than expression to convey emotion. In paintings such as Olympiad (2018), she experimented with colors mixed with fluorescent magenta paint and improbable arrangements of figures that balanced interests in how subjects fit together as abstract compositional elements and as potential social communities. The painting Couple No Shirts (2018) depicted an androgynous, economically drawn couple that implied a sense of universality while examining assumptions regarding categorization and looking.
In solo shows at Canada ("Mother Paintings," 2021; "Arms and the Sea," 2023; "Communal Table," 2025), and the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts and Hall Art Foundation, Bradford exhibited more moody, figurative paintings depicting varying degrees of familial intimacy and maternal feeling. Critics considered these paintings a further step in a narrative trajectory toward interpersonal relationships—and for the first time—outside events, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Her figures remained ambiguous—crudely drawn in contour lines, they diffused into Rothko-like abstract fields of color—but dominated their frames more, connecting through spare gestures and contact that conveyed themes of vulnerability, longtime affection and heroic care (e.g., Fever, Mother's Lap and Mother Carry).
In 2024, Karen Wilkin described Bradford's recent work as her "most complex to date," commenting, "She constructs her paintings with firm planes of color that are somehow brought to life so that we read them as figures. For all their generous scale and apparent simplifications, which make [them] eloquent from a distance, their rich orchestrations of surface, full-throttle color, and unpredictable imagery require (and reward) extended close attention."
