Beth Diane Armstrong
BIOGRAPHY
“Beth Armstrong’s current work marks a seismic crack-up in South African sculpture. Neither mortar nor figure, the staples of sculpture, Armstrong introduces not only a new philosophy of making and meaning in SA art, but its solution. diagrammatic and volumetric, her metal works challenge the stolidity and essentiality of the 3D figure, and, so doing, broaches the crack-up of being which we, in South Africa, have been incapable of addressing effectively.”
– Ashraf Jamal
Beth Armstrong graduated with her MFA from Rhodes University in 2010. Towards the end of her oustanding academic career, it is only fitting that Armstrong was heralded as one of Art South Africa’s most recent Bright Young Things, for work that breaks new ground in the medium of sculpture.
Armstrong’s first solo exhibition outside of the University will comprise her Masters body of work, Hippocampus, showing at iArt Gallery, 71 Loop Street from 28 April - 22 May 2010.
The collection of welded wire sculptures that began with the precarious image of a man-sized seahorse suggests some possibilities, instabilities and limitations inherent in representation and visual perception.
The word “hippocampus” serves a double purpose: firstly, it is the scientific name for a seahorse. It is also the name of a structure within the human brain (similar in shape to the marine creature) that is responsible for our capacity to make cognitive maps of space. There is a propensity in us all to see three dimensions over two; to interpret flat images as being spatial. There is also a tendency to want to recognise form and fix it to a meaning. Although existing in space, the sculptures resist a stable visual and conceptual representation and suggest ideas of other spaces, in between spaces, non-spaces, dream spaces that, at least in one’s conception and perception of it, never settles on a fixed axis of orientation.
EXHIBITIONS
towards an architecture of loss, July 2011
To skip the last step, January 2011
Hippocampus, April 2010
NOVUS
Summer in the City 2010
