Disability in British Art research group: Becky Beasley

Disability in British Art is a new Research Group of the British Art Network (BAN) led by independent artist and curator Ashokkumar Mistry and Disability Arts Online CEO Trish Wheatley. The second meeting on Thursday 16th June 2022 explored lived experience of disability in relation to British Art. Artist Becky Beasley was invited to present the following paper, examining how her late autism diagnosis became a lens through which she situated her artistic practice

H. S. P. (or Promising Mid-career Woman)

H. S. P. (or Promising Mid-Career Woman) is a coming-out exhibition by mid-career British artist Becky Beasley. H. S. P. expresses the joys and complexities of an entirely autistic life understood only in retrospect. Through the sensitivities of photographic, ceramic, and linen surfaces, the three centrepieces of H. S. P. are installations through which the paradoxes of the human need for intimacy manifest in alternatives that have become Beasley's trademark minimal approach to art making. How to live, how to speak, how to be together, how to be alone. H. S. P. – an acronym for Highly Sensitive Person1 - is a lyric to sensitive surfaces and to the highly individual process of being a person in the world. The insistence of individual presence is expressed in the reverse printed negative - often present in Beasley’s practice, - but here expressed repeatedly, insistently across the exhibition. BACK!, she insists. BACK! BACK! BACK! BACK! BACK! BACK! The reprise of Beasley’s last show at Galeria Plan B, ‘Depressive Alcoholic Mother’ (2018), in the form of the linoleum floor-work, Highly Sensitive Person, is an intentional déjà vu. The slight disorientation therein offers a tangible, uncanny experience of her own experience of late-diagnosis autism in the winter of 2020. Her personal research over the last two years led her deep into the fields of international medical negligence in female and hormonal healthcare and the ongoing misdiagnoses of atypical neurology

BOOKS & VOICES A Guest Artist Lecture Talk by Becky Beasley

Our Invited guest Artist from the UK Becky Beasley will explore her reading practices and spatial imagination in the context of her circular and revolutionary approach to learning from others’ perspectives and voices. The slide lecture will cover the background to her unique reading of, amongst others, William Faulkner and Thomas Bernard’s literary voices. She will also speak about her new-found understanding of how all this is an expression of her autistic point of view. PUBLICS and LUGEMIK are inviting you to join the Festival of Books and Voices. Initiated by PUBLICS and Lugemik, the Festival spreads out through the months of September, October and November, bringing together themes of Publishing and Voice. For this Autumn, our space in Vallila is showcasing an exhibition of 100 books published by Lugemik, an independent publishing initiative based in Tallinn. In celebration of the show, we will have a monthly program consisting of book launches, vinyl sound lounge, lectures, screenings, pop-up bookstores, discussions and readings! Festival of Books and Voices brings together book-related practices and the presence of voice – the two strands of PUBLICS that have been visible and active throughout the years, evolving through our public events and Library program. The festival continues the tradition of bringing attention to books and emphasising the context of our Library – a crucial and ever growing part of PUBLICS identity. At the beginning of each month, a scheduled event program will be announced

Ous

Becky Beasley’s photographs and sculptures, while deeply personal, often develop through an engagement with the ideas and works of other artists and writers. On this occasion, one such figure is artist and designer Eric Ravilious. Towner has one of the largest public collections of Ravilious’ works and this archive became a place for Beasley to start from and journey into. Along the way she encounters Paul Nash and Enid Marx. Across six room installations, OUS will explore Beasley’s ongoing interest in specific qualities raised by Ravilious’ practice: space, flatness, light, abstraction and nature, as well as his creative friendships. Through the filter of the artist’s deep engagement with the histories and possibilities of photography, the exhibition reflects by turns on themes of gardens, interiors, weather, mourning and human encounter. Featuring newly commissioned linoleum floor designs, photographs and sculptural works, these installations can be experienced as a gently unfolding environment in which questions of interior and exterior become blurred. Space can be experienced as an image, through a subtly dreamlike journey, at once pastoral and sensual

A Gentle Man

Video installation with decor. The great problem of the short story, as Bernard Malamud puts it, is 'to say everything that must be said and to say it quickly, fleetingly, as though two people had met for a moment in a restaurant, or a railroad station, and one had time only to tell the other they are both human, and, here, this story proves it.' A Gentle Man, is inspired by a short Story by Bernard Malamud. In a time where ceaseless brevity of encounter and communication is a way of life, the short story feels more vital than ever and the short form is at the heart of this exhibition. A Gentle Man is a video installation with a linoleum floor and decor that transforms the length of the gallery’s five rooms into a journey, from day to night. This four-part video portrait of an imaginary man from birth to the present (1940-2017) explores gentleness through its four discreet chapters: The First Story; Me for You; In the Rain/MAMA; A Man Walking Up Broadway. The work presents four short films, offering them as minor transgressions (of engagement, responsibility, cliché, profound love), and proposes their transformative potential as choices. Each chapter’s location, along a floor design that traces Broadway through Manhattan, represents, symbolically, a different time of day—morning, afternoon, evening, and night—and, emotionally, an unspecified interior or exterior. In the exterior scenes it is always raining. The floor design scarcely maps the space of Bernard Malamud’s early writing, and the short story, "Spring Rain" (1942), which is set around Morningside Heights. Malamud’s free education –from Flatbush to Harlem – is also mapped. 'Spring Rain' – written by the Brooklyn-born Malamud when he was 28 – was not published until 1989, three years after his death, and has received little attention. Malamud’s biographer Philip Davis has confirmed this. Beasley has been fascinated by the story for a decade, and at 80WSE she has taken the opportunity to chase the story in Manhattan itself. 'Spring Rain' is a tender picture of interiority and a glimpse into a man’s experience of himself and responses to others. It is also about present-ness and time; a life and an evening flash into clarity for a moment as a result of watching a young man die at the beginning of the story and, later, whilst walking in the rain with his daughter’s boyfriend. Using only existing light, the exhibition moves from day-lit front rooms on Washington Square to unlit rear spaces, illuminated here by large video projections. Kissing Chairs, designed as a multi-part sculpture by the artist, is presented in each of the rooms of the exhibition for visitors to sit on. Chapter 1, Morning, Interior – The First Story. How a man came to engage as a writer and to write his first published stories / News of war from Europe / Recording the quotidian signs of ordinary life. Text extracted from Robert Giroux’s Introduction to The People & Uncollected Stories by Bernard Malamud, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1989 Chapter 2, Afternoon, Exterior (Spring Rain) – Me For You, 'Mir sol sein far dir', sung by Irving Grossman (1931). 'Mir soll sein far dir', or 'Me for you', is a Yiddish mother’s lament, which Malamud affectionately relates instead to his father: 'One day during the Depression, as I was lying in bed with a heavy cold, miserable because I had no job, (my father) came up the stairs from the store, and after we had talked a minute, he took my foot in his hand and said ‘mir soll sein far dir’ — ‘I’d rather it were I than you’. I’ve always remembered that.' Malamud Papers, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Centre, University of Austin, Texas (HRC 29.6) Extract of 'Mir sol sein far dir' translated from Yiddish: Every mother prays… If I could only suffer for you, if only I could suffer instead of your little bones, instead of your little teeth, my dear child It’s hard to forget her tender words: 'If I could suffer for you' Chapter 3, Evening, Interior – In the Rain / MAMA. Text: Extracted from ‘Spring Rain’ (1942) by Bernard Malamud 'When Malamud was making notes on his friend Howard Nemerov’s collection of poems, The Western Approaches (1975), he suddenly sketched out in the midst of them a little frail poem of his own. Written more than forty-five years after her death, it was headed ‘In the rain / MAMA’.' In the rain / MAMA Don’t go in the rain Not in the rain, my son, she said Or it will make you catch a cold You will get sick So don’t go in the rain. Mama, when you died I walked in the rain. 'I walked in the rain’ meant that finally no one could or even should protect him. To become a free man with even a normal life meant taking defiant risks and feeling the pain and the lonliness that went with them. It felt like necessary disobedience and yet was still a cry of lostness.” Bernard Malamud: A Writers Life, Philip Davis, Oxford University Press, 2010, p7. In the rain / MAMA: the original script can be found at the Library of Congress: Malamud Holding LC II 12.14 Chapter 4, Night, Exterior (spring rain) – A man walking up Broadway Music: Winterreise (The Linden Tree) by Schubert; Played in reverse Don’t be fragile Don’t be fragile Don’t be fragile Don’t be fragile A note to himself, written by Bernard Malamud on Tuesday March 18, 1986, the day he died. The original script can be found at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Centre, University of Austin, Texas, Malamud Papers, Box 34 Folder 4 (HRC 34:4) Décor Linoleum (black, lilac & yellow) ‘Broadway’ floor design, six colored metal ‘kissing’ benches, four ‘sweater-cushions’, and ‘Palisades’ curtains. Cartographer, Molly Roy’s beautiful map, Oscillating City — which charts population density in Manhattan by day and by night — from Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas, by Rebecca Solnit and Joshua Jelly-Schapiro, published by UCPress, will exhibited in the first gallery as a prelude. British actor, Russell Tovey (Looking, HBO; Quantico, ABC: Angels in America, Royal National Theatre, London) narrates. The exhibition is curated by Nicola Lees, Director and Curator of 80WSE, with Curatorial Assistant Marguerite Wynter

Two Plants in Dip

In 2018 I began developing a new body of research, the early stage of which was supported by the Artists Research Centre (ARC), an organization set up to ally the University, Library, Museums and Public Gallery (Focal Point) in Southend. This research related to my initial proposal to ‘take my 71 year old mother to Southend for a weekend to talk about the future’. During the research I made contact with two academics in relation to Carl Linneaus’s design contributions. Staffan Müller-Wille at Exeter Univesity and Isabelle Charmantier, Archivist at the Linnean Society, both allowed me to published redacted versions of their their academic essays and with great interested as part of the Appendix of the book and the book is now in the Linnean Society library. The resulting book, Two Plants in Dip, was launched simultaneously at Focal Point Gallery and Tate Modern Publishing Fair, and I have since done a reading from it for a Copy Press event at Strange Cargo in Folkstone

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead

Depressive Alcoholic Mother

Curated solo exhibition of existing works from the last ten years. Curated with an essay by Mihnea Mircan

Sleep is When you Grow

Mixed media solo exhibitio

A Slight Nausea: An Interior

'A Slight Nausea', a new live work by Becky Beasley, was a purposely designed décor which traced her interest in the relationship between literary images and interiors. Evolving over four weekends in January, visitors were invited to spend time in the space. Beasley uses this quote by Italian polymath Carlo Mollino to invoke the work, A Slight Nausea: "If I were left alone I wouldn’t move a single chair; the interior is the most 'neutral' I could wish for: it doesn’t disturb me, it doesn’t wrongly excite me, but it leaves me free to be alone with my imagination, we might called it my inner landscape, one which gives a certain tone to everything. But there does remain a perceptible on-going sense of slight nausea necessary to prevent acceptance, comfort." The interior underwent four subtle lighting changes, varying each weekend. The décor incorporated a linoleum revolving newspaper racks containing weekend newspapers, take away copies of Carlo Mollino’s essay on interiors, Utopia & Setting, and ring binders containing photocopies of Beasley's archive of newspaper cuttings, A Little History of The Interior: A Personal Archive (1994-2014). The project was explored in a conversation between the artist and the SLG's Associate Curator Anna Gritz on Wednesday 29 January. Please note A Slight Nausea was de-installed after 26 January, in advance of the talk