Beth Collar at Sundy

Artist: Beth Collar

Exhibition title: The Unforgiven

Venue: Sundy, London, UK

Date: October 8 – November 19, 2022

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Sundy, London

Note: Paraphrase on the Sighting of a Bird by Yaniya Lee is available here

For “The Unforgiven”, Beth Collar has made a series of drawings on a set of seven plaster livers. When we talked, early on in her making, we discussed haruspicy, the ancient art of reading the entrails of animals – commonly livers – to divine the will of the gods; augury, the study of the behaviour of birds for omens; Gabor Maté, the Hungarian- Canadian trauma specialist; Thoth; hawks; the downtrodden; the unforgiven, and this one pterodactyl from the German artist Max Klinger’s ten -part etching series, “Paraphrase on the Finding of a Glove” (1877-1878).

Beth also told me she was searching through images in her old notebooks. Thinking of Beth’s larger body of work and researching all these components together, I began writing, and what I ended up with, in lieu of a traditional exhibition text, was the following short story, written in conversation with this exhibition but by no means meant as a deciphering key for it. If anything, the character in this story occupies the negative space of “The Unforgiven.”