British born artist Veronica Bailey has created a recognizable body of still life photography that fuses her interests in history, archive, materiality and abstraction. In her most recent body of work Postscript, Bailey formulates a visually arresting and seductive collection of photographs that document a revealing archive of letters written by model/muse/photographer Lee Miller during her years as a war correspondent in World War II.

The letters in Postscript focus primarily on the correspondence between Miller (1907-1977) and British Surrealist artist Roland Penrose (1900-1984) prior to their marriage in 1947, but also include communications with her wartime employer and Vogue editor, Audrey Withers. During the years the letters were written, Miller documented the Blitz, the liberation of Paris as well as Nazi concentration camps and their victims upon their liberation. These were frenetic times for Miller much like her passionately charged relationship with Penrose.

Bailey was granted full access of the Lee Miller Archive at Farley Farm in East Sussex. Each letter is photographed long and thin, yet seduces with its soft lines of folded paper and hinted text. The materiality of antiquated torn paper is both sculptural and erotic. Although the viewer is never privy to the content, Bailey’s titles Don’t Make Me Wait Too Long, I Love You and Mad With Envy connect directly with the emotional charge of the letters without revealing their intimate details.1 Much of the power of these images lies in their subtle erotic mystery.

London based artist Veronica Bailey received her BA from Middlesex University and her MA from Central Saint Martins College. Just after receiving her MA, Bailey won the 2003 Jerwood Prize in photography for the 2 Willow Rd. Series – photographs of books from the library of the modernist architect Erno Goldfinger and his wife Ursula Blackwell. Her work has been published in Art Forum, Eye Magazine, Portfolio and Grafik. She is represented by Frost and Reed in London/New York, Tartar Gallery in Toronto and Bank in Los Angeles. This is Bailey’s west coast debut.