This series is only indicative of ‘landscape’ but location is not entirely incidental. I did drive west with the view of reaching the border of New South Wales or perhaps the fringes of where civilisation meets the wilderness… Certainly something I am keenly interested in. Maybe it’s the vastness. Maybe it’s the timelessness. Maybe it’s searching for a landscape that is both familiar and alien. I’m not sure I have entirely unpacked that yet but driving and watching the landscape shift the further west I drove was always the intention.

More importantly for me is the framing of the landscape. I like to play with the ‘viewing distance’- the illusory distance in pictorial representation/ the horizon line…. The perceptual depth of landscapes has always intrigued me. My use of the reflection of the landscape in marred zinc flattens this depth, while drawing attention back to surface…

Rebecca Beardmore 2021

Venturing out, sourcing site and vantage point, engaging with atmospherics of place; obtusely photographing an image as reflected onto a metal sheet of scarred zinc for an element of remove of surface and distance; creating a figment not a fact.

Placement, not place, visually ‘framing’, selecting out the aspect and angle of shooting: down low, below, lying on her belly, or a drone shot from above, near, or farther away is integral to Rebecca Beardmore’s image making. Or shooting with eyes shut, capturing a maverick aspect. Responding to the associative power of the unfocused vision to discover undeveloped senses of ‘seeing’.

All these approaches are integral to Rebecca Beardmore’s practice-wide and ongoing quest in understanding, challenging and visually interpreting the psychology and science, the accidents and the enigmas within seeing and perception.

Polymer photogravure that encompasses photography and multi-plate intaglio printing is the artist’s chosen medium for seeing, siting, sight as it combines the visual and physical construction techniques of both process-intense mediums in one. She exploits the multiple stages of the polymer photogravure

process to create multi-panel images and colour-ways. One work can be created from nine colour plates, others four. ‘Ghost’ images tantalize. Created when the first image is pulled from a single inking and then a ghost image, Image G2991, from whatever is left on the plate. As ever her aim is to draw attention from representation towards abstraction

At their heart, Rebecca Beardmore’s poetic, near painterly images are not about what or where, but the way of image-making. When broken down into their parts, tipped over or inverted with sky below, land above rendering horizons ambiguously finite or infinite, or halted at intervals of their four-colour separation (cyan/magenta/yellow/black) printing process, individual images still depict the same place, same time, same location of their capture. BUT by playing with the paradox of perception we read the same shots as different or non-representational.

Barbara Dowse
Curator

Artist Biography

Rebecca Beardmore is a Canadian-born Australian contemporary artist based in Sydney. She completed her MFA in the department of Art and Design at the University of Alberta, a Centre for Excellence in Printmaking. Through an innovative and experimental approach to materials and techniques, Rebecca seeks to expand the rhetoric around image perception and disrupt the image as an object of representation – evoking tensions between reading, seeing and perception.

An accomplished print artist, Rebecca is particularly invested in the material properties that print affords to the photographic image. In this current body of work, refined traditional hand printed photographic processes mingle with reprographic 4-colour separation printing, to emphasise the image encounter through its material surface. Crucially, the works present a convergence between the photographs proposed authenticity and experience of immediacy with the material subtlety and sensuality of more painterly impressions. Exploiting technologies of image production, old and new, Rebecca’s practice engages directly with the legacy of fine art printmaking to elicit contemplative viewing scenarios.

Rebecca is a lecturer at the University of Sydney, Sydney College of the Arts. She has published papers on the intersection of printmaking and photography in contemporary art and the expanding technologies in contemporary print practice. Rebecca is a previous winner and has been an invited judge in Australia’s most prestigious print prize, The Fremantle Print Award. She exhibits internationally and is represented by Artereal Gallery, Sydney.

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