The Mural Series

Beatrice’s recent work is a series of monumental paintings around the theme of separation associated with enforced isolation. The viewer is immersed in a jungle like space, notably devoid of figures or animals. Yet this isolation is juxtaposed by several works made up in multiple parts (e.g. the Mural Series, STEVE and Candy Stripers).

She is naturally attracted to this type of representation as a twin and many of her works take the form of diptych or triptych, a motif which emerged in her Koi Series (2018-20). Reading widely around a subject is central to her practice which is reflected in the titles of each large work. Her influences are wide ranging; from music to production design, cartoons, advertising, Chagall’s stained glass, tapestry and wallpaper making and the freezing of a moment in poetry.

7. In A Quite Simple Desperate Human Way, 2022
Oil on canvas
167cm x 137cm

The exhibition’s title is taken from John Keats’s poem ‘Ode On A Grecian Urn’ (1819), where the narrator examines scenes of human life depicted on an urn, frozen in time.  As humans shrank away from one another at the start of 2020 the reassuring continuity and cycle of nature became completely absorbing to the artist.

Over a six-month period she watched and drew from the same spots continuously, seeing plants grow up, crowd together (in antithesis to human society), blooming and dying and being replaced with the new. During this period she began working on a much larger scale, dramatically transforming the original subject matter. The paintings became a physical space which surround the viewer and reality becomes the material fact of the paint rather than the subject itself.