Bea Underwood

My practice is concerned with the biographical qualities of materials and the mutable boundaries between material and object. Recent works have sought to reclaim the empty fabric skins of past sculptures, exploring their potential to hold a different kind of shape and weight.

There is an undercurrent of fictionalising in my making. The works’ ambiguity lends itself to speculation - imagined uses for the objects or worlds in which they might exist. A series of soft-but-structured stuffed sculptures attempt to balance incongruous elements: hybrid forms that confuse perceptions of use. 

I have a strong consideration for tactility and its relationship to ambiguity. We encounter the unknown as haptic beings. With a soft familiar skin of everyday fabric, some works speak of furniture, body and storage in their strange incarnation. 

Other material explorations are evolving into building blocks for structures: papier-mache panels and discs that will join to form quasi-buildings and machines at a scale that brings to mind childhood play.

Connecting these lines of enquiry is an interest in gathering malleable materials and entering a negotiation with them. I seek to balance their materiality with the impact of my form-producing interventions. The forms themselves reflect my preoccupation with certain kinds of functional negative space. They reference pockets, cups, boxes, sacks – simple signifiers of containment, or the potential for it.