Bethany Hadfield
B:Middlesbrough 1994. Lives and works in London.
She received BA in Painting at Wimbledon College of art in 2016.
Bethany Hadfield
‘Getting out of the meat, getting out of matter is a great dream’ Sadie Plant
In my painting I am exploring multiplicities
multiplicities
multiplicities
multiplicities
multiplicities multiplicities multiplicities
The paintings are not depictions of things, or even worlds, I am trying to grasp something considered ‘immaterial’ and show it as what it truly is; reality.
I work in the emancipatory realm of technology. With the aid of digital tech I produce paintings explore the networks of what is considered the ‘self’, ‘ecologies’, ' future'.
Sketches created on Blender (an open-source software) and translated to canvas with oil and acrylic. I act as a microwave for these digital sketches; paint heats, smudges, boils over and drips, manifesting vitality.
Each painting is an open ended question or possibility, dabbled with intuition in a networked, collaborative approach with the machine.
‘To be entangled is not simply to be intertwined with another, as in the joining of separate entities, but to lack an independent, self-contained existence. Existence is not an individual affair. Individuals do not pre-exist their interactions; rather, individuals emerge through and as part of their entangled intra-relating’ Karen Barad Meeting the Universe Halfway, 2007.
The negation of the body in a idea that has flickered through contemporary discourse of left and right ideas of singularity for some time. (Cyberspace leads us to this great dream;) ‘If we are to have pure knowledge of everything ,we must get rid of the body and contemplate things by them self with the soul by itself’ Sadie Plant quoting Socrates, 1994. Cyberspace allows us to better accept the body, and as do the minds of plants and animals. Microbial time, symbiotic and chemical processes (hyphae) (nematodes) (water bEaRs) whose communications are with matter, without 'brain', can be considered material modes of communications.
'Our lot is cast with technoscience, where nothing is so sacred that it cannot be re-engineered and transformed so as to widen our aperture of freedom ,extending to gender and the human. To say nothing is sacred, that nothing nothing is transcendent or protected from the will to know, to tinker and to hack is to say nothing is supernatural’ Helen Hester XenoFeminism: A Politics for Alienation
Homage to Ada –
190cm x 135cm
Acrylic on canvas
2022
Dandelions in acid rein –
190cm x 135cm
Acrylic on linen
2022
Rendered video
2021
Deep Breaths –
165cm x 155cm
Oil on canvas
2021
Acid Rain gives me Stomach Ulcers –
180cm x 120cm
Oil on canvas
2021
Violent contradiction –
Oil and acrylic on linen
210cm x 190cm
2022
Hell in Eyelashes –
Rendered video
2022
Chew quickly and loudly or you'll choke –
Oil and acrylic on canvas 2022
175cm x 150cm
Preternatural –
165cm x 165cm
Oil on canvas
2022
ASMR –
Rendered video
2020
The TruTH LiesS In tHe sOil –
Oil on canvas
250cm x 250cm
2022
2Acrylic on canvas
202
Medium:
Acrylic on canvasSize:
190 x 135cm
I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root:
It is what you fear.
I do not fear it: I have been there.
Is it the sea you hear in me,
Its dissatisfactions?
Or the voice of nothing, that was your madness?
Love is a shadow.
How you lie and cry after it
Listen: these are its hooves: it has gone off, like a horse.
All night I shall gallop thus, impetuously,
Till your head is a stone, your pillow a little turf,
Echoing, echoing.
Or shall I bring you the sound of poisons?
This is rain now, this big hush.
And this is the fruit of it: tin-white, like arsenic.
I have suffered the atrocity of sunsets.
Scorched to the root
My red filaments burn and stand, a hand of wires.
Now I break up in pieces that fly about like clubs.
A wind of such violence
Will tolerate no bystanding: I must shriek.
The moon, also, is merciless: she would drag me
Cruelly, being barren.
Her radiance scathes me. Or perhaps I have caught her.
I let her go. I let her go
Diminished and flat, as after radical surgery.
How your bad dreams possess and endow me.
I am inhabited by a cry.
Nightly it flaps out
Looking, with its hooks, for something to love.
I am terrified by this dark thing
That sleeps in me;
All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.
Clouds pass and disperse.
Are those the faces of love, those pale irretrievables?
Is it for such I agitate my heart?
I am incapable of more knowledge.
What is this, this face
So murderous in its strangle of branches?——
Its snaky acids hiss.
It petrifies the will. These are the isolate, slow faults
That kill, that kill, that kill.
Sylvia Plath, “Elm” from Collected Poems. Copyright © 1960, 1965, 1971, 1981 by the Estate of Sylvia Plath