A giant teardrop of glass, hitched to a metal spine. Root systems unfurling across an aluminium sheet. A column of fleshy pink orbs, cinched with steel, reminiscent of breasts, or cells about to divide. In Gabriele Beveridge’s work, organic and bodily forms are suggested and then denatured, forced into proximity with the cold armature of industry. Via intensive chemical processes and extreme heat, she manipulates commercial materials to create spectres of softness, aliveness, and transience. Entrancing and disquieting, her sculptures call attention to a world—our world—in which the industrial and the ecological are inextricable, co-constitutive, and in which things are...
A giant teardrop of glass, hitched to a metal spine. Root systems unfurling across an aluminium sheet. A column of fleshy pink orbs, cinched with steel, reminiscent of breasts, or cells about to divide.
In Gabriele Beveridge’s work, organic and bodily forms are suggested and then denatured, forced into proximity with the cold armature of industry. Via intensive chemical processes and extreme heat, she manipulates commercial materials to create spectres of softness, aliveness, and transience. Entrancing and disquieting, her sculptures call attention to a world—our world—in which the industrial and the ecological are inextricable, co-constitutive, and in which things are often not what they seem.
Glass, long central to Beveridge’s practice, is a richly duplicitous material. It conjures fixity and fluidity, offers clarity and distortion. At once liquid and solid, it contests the idea that anything is truly stable or comprehensible. For the artist, glass is a medium akin to time: endlessly flowing, accumulating, stretching, continuing—never quite resolved. Beveridge’s “Stem” and “Spine” series, in which handblown balloons of glass slump and spill over skeletal metal structures, dwell in this uncanny valley. Both vaguely human and extremely artificial, they test our perceptions, and resist finality.
Worked in a molten state, glass demands both authority and acquiescence on the part of the maker. Beveridge’s latest aluminium panel works are also steeped in risk, and emerge in the space between control and chance. Anodised to a sheen through an electrochemical process, the sheets are then bathed in sulphuric acid and dripped with dyes to create branchlike, vegetal patterns that conjure up milk duct anatomy, river networks, or mycelium. The disjunction between these ecological simulacra and the deeply chemical process through which they are generated is yet another way in which Beveridge reminds us just how much of an illusion we are inhabiting.
— Meara Sharma
