exhibition

Blue Bird and Other Stories

Philippa Beale

21.Mar.07 - 10.Apr.07
Mon-Fri 10-7 during exhibitions

Private View, 20.Mar.07, 6:30 pm

London College of Communication
London College of Communication
Elephant and Castle
London SE1 6SB
020 7514 6853
media@lcc.arts.ac.uk
www.lcc.arts.ac.uk
Tube Elephant & Castle, Lambeth / Southwark

Blue Bird and Other Stories is the first retrospective exhibition of work by conceptual artist, Philippa Beale. Over three decades, Beale’s image and text ‘manipulations’ have both exposed and exploited the role played by representation in bearing our desires.

She has worked in a wide range of media, from photography and printmaking to sculpture, video and installation. This exhibition focuses on the wall-based works from the 1970s to the present, with over fifty pieces including screen prints, drawings, photographs and digital images.

Blue Bird and Other Stories places Beale’s work within the context of Conceptual Art in Britain since the 1970s and its foundational relationship with London’s design colleges. In keeping with the artist’s practice, the exhibition foregrounds questions of process and authorship and includes works by three of her collaborators: Jane Humphrey, Graham Diprose and Chris Plato.

Beale emerged as an artist in the early 1980s with large, serial screen prints that often humorously play on the confusion between Fine Art and advertising. Prefiguring the work of later women artists such as Tracey Emin, Love Story (1980), lists all the men an imagined woman might have slept with had she been afforded the freedoms of a younger generation. Other early prints – Baby Love (1982), Red Shoes (1985), and Past Her Sell Buy Date (1986) – use a cosy 1950s vernacular to
challenge received wisdom about female sexuality.

In recent works, Beale has turned to well-known tales of loss, longing and deliverance, using new digital technology to conjure luminescent, multilayered images. In Stations of The Cross (2006), photographs have been projected onto cast reliefs, which are then re-photographed to produce a series of prints, accompanied here by the continuously looped recording of a young woman reciting a satirical ode to cliché.

Philippa Beale studied at Goldsmiths College and the University of Reading before teaching postgraduate design at the London College of Communication as part of an emerging generation of artists – Jeff Nuttall, William Furlong, Radovan Kraguly, Natt Gooden and Robin Klassnik. It was here that she met and collaborated extensively with the artist Jane Humphrey and latterly with the photographer Graham Diprose.

She has sought input from several typographic practitioners, but predominantly Christopher Plato, who is also an alumnus of the college.

Blue Bird and Other Stories gives viewers an opportunity to see how traditional and state-of-theart technologies, text and image, high and low art, have been embraced by Philippa Beale over three decades, to create consistently moving and provocative work.