Bethany Stead

Working through drawing, painting and sculpture, I attempt to make image, object, and space that challenges and disrupts our fragile social fabric.​ My work is concerned with the sense of discomfort and awkwardness of inhabiting biological and artificial bodies in a constantly fluxing world, forming a kind of psychological dissection.

I examine themes of physical and mental health, hierarchy and labour, garment and cloth, worship and pseudo-religion, posthumanism, ecology and the evolution of technology, filtered through a lens of class and queerness. Metamorphic and playful figures that transgress category, reside within unsettling or idyllic internal landscapes and architectures, dispersed with subconscious symbol and archetype. My imagery draws on personal writing, and is shaped by a scattered reading into psychoanalysis, philosophy, theology, anthropology, feminist theory, science-fiction and magical realism.

Current work focuses on the pictorial, through painting on large sewn panels of paper or smaller handmade sheets, and constructing objects and figures with clay, cloth, papier mache and wood. I look to challenge conventional representations of the human, creature, and gendered being, restaging within spaces free from binaries. Rejecting the numbness of visual escapism, I embrace complicated personal experiences around gender, dress, sexuality, health, violence, technology and grief. The two dimensional works echo manuscripts, books or scrolls, accompanied by sculptures that act as ritualistic reliquaries, artefacts or fossils, and remain key to reading the narrative of the work. ​​​​​​