Katriona Beales

www.katrionabeales.com

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Mixed media visual artist based at the Bluecoat.

I am a mixed media visual artist interested in the dialogue created by the spaces in between disciplines. Much of my work is concerned with social commentary and with pattern, repetition and anomaly. The resultant work is often quite time or labour intensive. Conceptual weight is important to me – in valuing my own product. I need to feel that it has evolved out of an intellectually innovative and rigorous process that stretches me – mentally, emotionally and physically.

I am interested in the decay of the certainties of modernism with its safe linear philosophies and the opportunities and problems of the proliferation of post-modernity and post that. In this context it’s the human condition and the experience of being human that draws me. I have a consistent concern with using discarded, invaluable and/or everyday materials as a critique of some of the hierarchies traditionally entrenched within society, and art in particular. Though not outwardly ‘religious’, the process of my work is underpinned with my belief in the Creator God and in the importance of creativity as part of my spiritual experience.

Past work has engaged with the concepts of exile, dislocation and disconnection. I spent a couple of years 2005-6 exploring and theorising around the idea of ‘internal exile’, which was a phrase coined as an attempt to highlight some of the shortfalls in a context of globalised interactions. For the last 2 years I have worked on a series of ‘paper lace’ pieces made by pricking holes in paper with needles. More recently, this has developed into 3D interventions in wood.

Based in Liverpool, UK, since 2001, I am now an in-house artist in the newly reopened the Bluecoat.

Event:  The Lost Soul and Stranger Service Station - 19.09.2008 - 10.10.2008