Some Chthonic Swamp Experience | Tintype Project Space 2014 Beth Collar

12 February – 8 March 2014

Tintype Project Space 2014

Beth Collar’s practice questions the construction of a collective historical consciousness and the desire to commune with pasts both real and imagined. Her performances – sometimes enacted in front of effigies or piles of earth – draw the audience into a vividly drawn narrative, snaking through the violent histories embedded in landscapes such as the East Anglian Fens.

A recurring theme is underneath-ness, a swampy, hidden, submerged underworld, both physical and metaphorical. For Some Chthonic Swamp Experience Collar’s hand became the conveyor or protagonist for a series of works. Wrapping the gallery in large-scale drawings on transparent film, she depicted the hand in the last moment of existence – before being engulfed by a expansive panorama of brown swamp. The swamp acts as a backdrop, setting the scene in a mixture of earth pigments and bodily fluids.

Beth Collar

Installation view, 2014

Drawings – Casein Lactic & earth pigments on acetate/diacetate Props – Tripod, hazel poles, tape, plaster, acrylics, no more nails

Beth Collar

Installation view, 2014

Beth Collar

Props – detail, 2014

Beth Collar

Installation view, 2014

Drawings – Casein Lactic & earth pigments on acetate/diacetate Props – Tripod, hazel poles, tape,

Beth Collar

Installation view, 2014

Beth Collar

Props – detail, 2014

Beth Collar

One Thing We're All Waiting For is Peace on Earth and an End to War, 2014

Steel helmet, tablet, video

Beth Collar

Installation view, 2014

Beth Collar

Island of the Dead, 2014

Digital video, 22mins 55secs Edition of 5