Bethany Stead

Background

About Bethany Stead

I am an artist working between drawing, painting, sculpture and textiles, interested in materials that are historically associated with class, gender and sexuality. I use clay, wood, fabric and paper to generate conversations, visual stories, and forms of reimagining in response to social barriers. I attempt to explore the discomfort and awkwardness of inhabiting a body, the history of bodily health, the human connection to clothing and costume, the notion worship and religion, and our relationship with the none human sphere through the lens of class. Metamorphic, animalistic and anthropomorphic, drawings and sculptures stand as beings, residing within unsettling or idyllic spaces. Symbolism and archetypes thread through my work, influenced by intergenerational storytelling and personal writing as a form of therapy, looking at psychoanalysis, animism, magical realism and folklore. Recent bodies of work focus on image making, using paint, pencil and ink on paper, or sometimes sewing with textile and paper. They explore an embodied reconnection to forgotten worlds and ideas, and move away from a visual escapism that numbs complicated experiences, related to health, gender, sexuality, class, ecology and grief. The flat works weave together deeper connections between myself and the characters, as well as develop a personal visual language, and draftsmanship. Paper works that reference religious iconography, are accompanied by sculpture and object, that act as suggestive offerings of ritual, and have become key to reading the imagery and narrative of the works.