Review by holly english

When I first met Beth nearly 20 years ago she was an abstract colourist. Deep in thought but light of heart, her paintings radiated joy then, as they do now, as does everything she cares for. We visited Amsterdam together on the Hans Brinker Painting Prize and saw Vermeer at the Hague-'View of Delft' and 'Girl with a Pearl Earring'. I remember that she was so profoundly moved that she vowed to practice figurative painting upon our return, and that's exactly what she did. Her first bath paintings were made and her work became itself.

I feel very welcome to spend time with Beth's practice. Her works quite literally beckon me in with a cup of tea and a comfy chair. But there is something much more beguiling going on here.

She applies layers of solid colour in a meditative act that seems almost domestic in its care and familiarity. The result is vast and enveloping. Yellow expands and exhales like riotous calendula whilst purple draws everything in like blotting paper.

There are no inert objects in these works, all things are beings of importance. Energy hops from form to form and perspectives shift under their weight. They seem to anticipate our needs, reaching out to catch us in a human embrace as we sink, bounce, slip, fly.

Beth works almost exclusively in vessels, particularly those which would contain a body- baths, chairs, shoes, a jacket. 

Are they imbued with the human souls who frequent them, or sentient forms themselves? 'Breathe' a chair piled past its head and shoulders with washing suggests a stand-in, with its arched back and its middle jutting forwards under the load. A load it looks oddly jolly to stagger about with. Elsewhere I see this anthropomorphic projection as a less humancentric world view, an acknowledgement of the complexity of processes and relationships in nature that mostly go unnoticed.

What is clear is an autobiographical element. Beth lives in an everyday arcadia where nature really is a co-conspirator and trees really do help with the washing. She prods and ignites this personal utopia through the paintings, where existence is collaborative and we cohabit with our surrounding flora and fauna. The inextricable link between her life and work mirrors a dogma of interdependence with the wild, or the not-human.

The 'rise paintings' nod to Rosseau's, 'the Dream' - a piece of magical realism which as a term seems to neatly define Beth's practice too.

Here again forms gravitate towards one another, breathing in spite of our reality. We are submerged in the murk of an unknown position and we rise up with the sun, rise up to declare our entanglement with the wild.

If this is the future I want to be there! Plonk me in that bath amongst the bluebells.