Name

Rebecca Beardmore

Culture

Australian | Canadian

Gender

Female

Birth date

20 June 1974

Birth place

Montreal , Canada View on map Close map

Occupations

Printmaker

Summary

Worked: Canada, Australia

Context

Australia

Web

http://www.artereal.com.au/home/rebecca-beardmore

Biography

Rebecca Beardmore is lecturer in Printmedia at Sydney College of the Arts, Sydney University. Her last body of work ‘Seeing Words, Reading Pictures’ explored the fragile relationship between seeing, perception and understanding. Sited at iconic panoramic lookouts such as The Gap, Sydney Harbour, Beardmore’s painterly photographic images of androgynous faces and figures kiss the surface of brushed aluminium or acrylic, often embossed with punctuation marks or silkscreened with fields of text with an objective description of the view.

 

An extract reads:

Prolonged wet weather has made the ground too damp to sit. The day’s current condition reveals no visual evidence but a firm press of the hand on the grass confirms the sizable rainfall that must have drenched these parts in recent days. The small patch of grass surrounded by native scrub on one side and a cement path on the other shows signs of fresh growth…

 

The work is based on the bounds of perception: the images have a fleeting presence that is almost an absence, in which the viewer is partially reflected; setting up a provocative and shifting relationship between image, text and material surface where each layer is presented with such fragility that they cannot be easily discerned. To engage fully with one, involves relinquishing another. In effect the viewer is in a space between what they see and what they know.

 

On Reflection is a continuation of this investigation, which relies upon the built environment, reflections in metal and steel from buildings.

[Gallery media, 2010]