Gabriele Beveridge recently completed her residency at West
Dean College, where she was based in the Visual Arts department and
the Edward James Studios. The residency proved to be a very
valuable time for Gabriele.
In contrast to her usual practice of working to exhibition
deadlines and with specific end goals in mind, Gabriele decided to
approach the residency with an open and intuitive mind set, hoping
to explore new processes while reacting to the environment of West
Dean. One week into the residency Gabriele discovered the small
darkroom and, having not been in one for almost ten years, decided
to experiment with exposing some of the haberdashery tape she had
gathered for her weaving induction at the College, automating the
process of tapestry. Another series of 'landscape' works created in
the darkroom were produced by simply experimenting with the
chemicals and eliminating exposed objects or subjects entirely.
Gabriele also worked with clay for the first time, treating the
material in an idiosyncratic way - unconcerned with attempting to
make something resembling anything specific or typical.
In her wider work, Gabriele reconfigures the hierarchies of
commercial images and objects through strategies of selection,
framing and recombination. Her diverse assemblages, often including
hand-blown glass, seek to examine the relationship between the
shared access that everyone might have to the visual languages that
saturate our contemporary existence and the special access that
each of us has to personal memory and private experience. Less
interested in a prescriptive rhetoric on consumer culture than
exploring how the poetic and the personal can be addressed under
contemporary conditions, Beveridge sits on the line between
ambivalence and celebration - investigating a fascination between
the lure of consumer images and objects and the values that they
preserve and perpetuate.
Known primarily as someone that salvages images, it was an interesting shift for Gabriele to be creating her own images in the darkroom and an extension in her practice she wants to explore further:
"As much of my work often draws on materials that hover between real and imagined states, so do these new explorations in the darkroom. Completely unexpectedly, the residency at West Dean gave me the opportunity to re-discover the magic of the photographic process and break out of my comfort zone of familiar materials. The range of facilities and support available at West Dean College aren't available on other residencies, it allows an artist complete freedom."
Gabriele Beveridge was born in 1985 in Hong Kong. She lives
and works in London, UK. Beveridge holds an MA in Fine Art Media
from the Slade School of Fine Art (London) and a BA in photography
from Falmouth College of Arts (Falmouth). She has had solo
exhibitions at Frieze Focus London with CHEWDAY'S, Deweer Gallery
(Otegem), MOT International (Brussels), Zabludowicz Collection
(London), Elizabeth Dee (New York) and La Salle de bains (Lyon).
Beveridge has also participated in several group exhibitions at Off
Vendome (New York), Spinello Projects (Miami), Galerist (Istanbul),
Glasgow International (Glasgow), Hayward Gallery (London) and at
the Arnhem Museum of Modern Art (Arnhem). Her works are found in
collections such as the Zabludowicz Collection, the Silvie Fleming
Collection and the Saatchi Collection, as well as various
international collections.
