Beth Collar at Waldo at Mathew Gallery

Artist: Beth Collar

Exhibition title: Thinking Here Of How The Words Formulate Inside My Head As I Am Just Thinking

Venue: Waldo, Rockport, Maine, US, Mathew Gallery, New York, US

Date: September 7 – October 4, 2018

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Waldo, Rockport

Amassing mass. A disembodied form bulging – not clear yet – what it is to be. When does it come out – or how even? It came crawling out of some wood bought for a different purpose: to make some man’s severed head to be honest. It was, therefore, already suggesting the face. In that it had the right dimensions. To dismantle the masters house with the renaissance masters tools. carving until I recognise that the face staring back is her own person and that she isn’t interested – and did its lips just move? Is it giving me evils? It was a feeling which amassed mass but which didn’t gain sounds or a word. Stacking up behind. Nothing tripped off my tongue. They massed themselves and fell, curved their backs and crashed; up spurted stones and shingle.

An out-breath through the reeds. Was it then like music? It came out of a density of atoms and yet it still hovers somewhere off camera. And I don’t see it. We were all seeing the surface of the stuff – the channels and folds through which a TIE Fighter might pursue an X-Wing, or a searing, bright-green grid of lasers might trace across it. A nanometer thick. But what’s behind that? Or under it for that matter. Or, then, with a dusting of makeup applied in the first consultation from the M.A.C. cosmetics counter at the (now closed) Bristol branch of Debenhams – and now updated with Jeffree Star tutorials – they; all to bring some life to her cheeks – all to grace her with a feminine touch, a mystique as it were; a signal to the world that they are in fact, to be quite plain, they’ve had their face put on, and still, formulated far off in the dark sea. Tide, precipitation, trade winds, undercurrents amassing a form that will spill out. That will chuck-up gravel into the bottom of the porcelain. This unknowable. Something like being approached by the warmth of another person’s arm when you’re sitting on an aeroplane. Radiation. But this was an exercise in AGENCY!

I always wanted to be Clint Eastwood. I always wanted to cut through a problem with a hot knife through warm butter. And with hawk eyes. And with these strokes, a glare. And with these, I swear, the whole history of magic.

B.C.

Beth Collar Born Cambridge, 1984. Education: MA Sculpture, Royal College of Art, London, 2012. Postgraduate Diploma in Drawing, The Princes Drawing School, London, 2010. BA Fine Art, London, Metropolitan University, London, 2007. Selected Solo Exhibitions and Performances: 2018 Cloaked Output Volume II (spirals of focus),

Primary, Nottingham; Thinking Here Of How The Words Formulate Inside My Head As I Am Just Thinking, Matt’s Gallery, London. 2017 Seriously, Standpoint, London 2015 11/50,Fig.2, ICA, London; Probably, Like a Melon Rolling Off a Table: Part II, performance, Serpentine Galleries, London 2014 SOME CHTHONIC SWAMP EXPERIENCE, Tintype Gallery, London 2013 The Brackish Seas of the Triassic, performance at the old chapel, Maughn Library, Kings College, London. Selected Group Exhibitions and Performances: 2018 Coronation, Horse and Pony Fine Art, Berlin; Juvenilia (with Eoghan Ryan), ROOM E-10 27 @ CENTER, Berlin; No, No, No, No, Cell Project Space, London 2017 Brainstem Thinking (with Hannah Still), Kunstraum, London; Household Values, Yvonne Lambert, Berlin; A rock that keeps tigers away, Kustverein München, Munich; Performance or Fuck You Where’s My Sugar, Café Oto, London 2016 A Million Lines, Bunkier Sztuki Gallery of Contemporary Art, Kraków; Secret Surface, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; Performance at Glasgow Women’s Library for Tall Tales touring exhibition, Glasgow; Tarantallegra, Hester, New York; Preserves and Presences, sculptural performance, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin 2015 The Cipher and the Frame, Cubitt, London; Secret Agents, Finnish Museum of Photography, Helsinki; The Spirit of the Staircase, The Sunday Painter, London; Bob Cobbiiiiiiiiing Live, performance event as part of Speaking Parts, Raven Row, London 2014 PALIMPSEST, performance collaboration with William Cobbing, Hayward Gallery Project Space, London. Residencies 2018 Waterloo Uncovered archaeological dig, 2017 University of Bristol History Department, ‘The Figure of the Witch’ research group 2015 RUPERT centre for Art and Education, Vilnius. Awards: The Arts Foundation ‘Visual Art Award’ 2017 (shortlisted), Voldemberge-Gildevart Award (Shortlisted); Arts Foundation ‘Live Art’ award (Shortlisted) 2017; Mark Tanner Sculpture Prize 2016-17; Gareth Watkins Memorial Bursary, associated with Kettles Yard, Cambridge 2011

Beth Collar, Thinking Here Of How The Words Formulate Inside My Head As I Am Just Thinking, 2018, exhibition view, Waldo, Rockport

Beth Collar, Thinking Here Of How The Words Formulate Inside My Head As I Am Just Thinking (4), 2016-18, lime-wood, cosmetics, 6 1/4 x 8 1/4 x 3 inches (16 x 20 x 8 cm)

Beth Collar, Thinking Here Of How The Words Formulate Inside My Head As I Am Just Thinking (1), 2016-18, lime-wood, cosmetics, 6 x 9 x 3 3/8 inches (15 x 22 x 9 cm)

Beth Collar, Thinking Here Of How The Words Formulate Inside My Head As I Am Just Thinking (5), 2016-18, lime-wood, cosmetics, 7 x 9 1/4 x 3 inches (18 x 23 x 8 cm)

Beth Collar, Thinking Here Of How The Words Formulate Inside My Head As I Am Just Thinking (2), 2016-18, lime-wood, cosmetics, 6 x 8 1/4 x 3 1/8 inches (15 x 20 x 8 cm)