Bradfield

Bradfield Dumpleton has devoted a lifetime (50+ years) to creative process. His work has included: professional cartoonist, illustrator, graphic designer, musician and writer; community artist, creative mentor and arts educator with almost 30 years teaching experience. He has designed and facilitated numerous specialist creative programs with a focus on creativity and well-being, in areas such as remedial and gifted education, at-risk youth and mental health.

Caja De Huesos (2023)

Caja De Huesos translates as ‘Box Of Bones’, and this particular Box Of Bones is a collection of old songs written at various times between 1998 – 2009, but recorded here for the first time. I wrote many others through those years, but the songs I chose for Caja De Huesos are some of the […]

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Burial Grounds (2023)

The pieces on Burial Grounds emerged as part of the same process that produced Making Peace I & II and Looking For Light, and conceptually they carry elements of the same themes. This album explores how a place (land / house) can accumulate layers of historical trauma, and how the energies of that trauma can

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Making Peace I & II (2023)

My musicking process / continuum is unavoidably autobiographical, always reflecting some aspect of whatever life events my ‘self’ is experiencing at the time. I think of my albums more as creative journals and sketchbooks, drawing and writing in sound. The act is immediate, grabbing snatches of life as it swirls, rumbles, whizzes, grinds and shudders

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Intimacies (2023)

In today’s culture (gasping as it is for nuanced vocabulary and thought), the word ‘intimacy’ seems mainly to appear in conversations about (human) relationships, as polite popular code for sex. For those inclined to living with more nuance, there is a multifluence of ‘intimacies’. These include states of connection that can be metaphysical, extra-sensory and

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Because, Remember (2022)

Because, Remember is in part a meditation on memory: its fragmentary nature to begin with, and its unavoidable fragmentation over time. In particular, it explores the memory of a time that my children can’t even remember having with me. As an aging parent, I feel a strong undercurrent of sadness and loss in knowing that

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Displacement Ritual (2022)

A restless ceremonial jazz journey, exploring physical, emotional & psychic displacement. Moods shift in fluid ripples or jagged left-turns, dreamlike, coiling and slithering through moments of harmonic repose, fragmentary riffing and freeform dissonance. Initially recorded over a couple of days, in the thick of a very difficult & distressing house-move, and developed around one meandering

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SCHOOL OF CARTOON ARTISTRY: Cartoon Workshops Designed To Make You THINK!

In 2013 I began to synthesise a range of teaching techniques I’d been testing & refining over many years, into a process I called thINK Draw Connect Learn, or thINK for short. You can read more about thINK here. The thINK Process includes deconstructing drawing into abstract ‘Elements‘ and modelling how these simple building blocks

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thINK Draw Connect Learn

A DIFFERENT WAY TO thINK ABOUT DRAWING thINK is an educational drawing process and a set of creative learning tools I developed as a metacognitive teaching model for my students.  It evolved over a lifetime of deep observation of my own drawing processes, and decades of teaching creative thinking via the art of cartoon drawing. 

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Creative Communication: Cartooning for Emotional Literacy

Plenty of cartoonists have offered ‘how-to-draw’ workshops on ways to capture emotion in cartoon faces.  Often the ‘workshop’ is more of a demonstration or performance – the style is quick and sketchy, a quick fix aimed at entertainment rather than learning, and usually intended to promote the cartoonist’s latest book or other product. Of course,

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Kalonga (2022)

Although chronologically some of these recordings were made prior, Kalonga follows on from Floater, and the pieces all emerged from the same event, ie having to leave our home of the last 5 years. Kalonga is the name of the dirt road leading to where the house is situated – I’ve always liked the visual

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Floater (2022)

Over the months of June / July we had to move from our home of the last 5 years (Kalonga). Noise restrictions at our new home won’t allow me to freely record live sounds, so I spent the final weeks alone in the empty Kalonga, saying goodbye and hastily recording various live sounds that I

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Crucible (2022)

Some of my albums have no particular story, no underlying thematic glue or particular point of inspiration when I’m creating them.  I might impose an identity on these albums after the fact, but they really just exist as exercises in sound and composition for their own sake.  Crucible is one such. There are, however, two

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Surveying The Terrain IV: Autism Training for Counsellors, Social Workers and Allied Health Professionals

Between June 2020 – Feb 2021, I participated in over a dozen online surveys relating to adult autistic experience (more info here). Most were research projects focused on the very things I was living at the time – mental health & suicidality, autistic burnout, financial not-so-well-being, among others – and the surveys provided me a

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Surveying The Terrain III: ARCAP Research Priorities of Autistic People

Between June 2020 – Feb 2021, I participated in over a dozen online surveys relating to adult autistic experience (more info here). Most were research projects focused on the very things I was experiencing at the time – mental health & suicidality, autistic burnout, financial not-so-well-being, among others – and the surveys provided me a

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Xenografika (2022)

The first pieces for Xenografika began taking shape immediately after I completed the Kro Gnosis album, which had itself followed immediately after Temple, and all three albums emerged consecutively in the space of just six weeks, so it’s not surprising they form a thematic continuum. I’m tending to think of them as a trilogy of

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Kro Gnosis (2022)

Once again, a combination of disparate ingredients organically converged to bring about this new collection of musical explorations, Kro Gnosis.  I began these recordings immediately after completing the Temple album, which marked a return to actual recording (ie using a microphone & playing real instruments again, rather than collaging existing recorded materials, or generating sounds

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Temple (2022)

The emergence of the Temple recordings began with an unexpected musical gift from my partner Heidi: a beautiful 17-note kalimba (thumb piano).  I had mentioned to her quite awhile back that I’d like a kalimba to experiment with, so I was especially delighted when she surprised me with it. I didn’t engage with playing it

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Elegiac Reaction (2021)

Earlier this year I recorded a collection of spacious, minimalist piano pieces that became the album The Witnessing Of Paint In Its Drying Moments.  I was using these pieces to help me process a surge of deep grief and loss at the time.  I have no theoretical understanding of classical music composition (nor am I

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Other spaces: Postnebulism / Uncertainty Box (2021)

While these two albums certainly both share qualities of atmospherics, spacious soundscaping and ambient textures, they are both stylistically distinct from each other.  Part of why I’ve included them together in this post is that they also share the somewhat dubious quality of being ‘rehashed’, even if in different senses.  I’ve written elsewhere about cannibalising

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Murals & public art

It took me many years to get used to drawing on any kind of large scale, especially anything larger than A2 size. Several different experiences helped free me up in this area; in particular, when I began running cartoon workshops in schools, drawing on large blackboards (remember them?) and whiteboards in front of a class.

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