Beth Frey

I’ve spent the past week bedridden with no more than a common cold, but it was enough to offer me some sort of impetus to take a new approach to my art practice. This feeling’s been lingering for a while now, and despite the fact that I’ve found a particular voice in my 2D drawing work, my gut’s been telling me that I need to push myself further, to experiment across disciplines.

I should begin by explaining my background. I received my BFA in Visual Arts five years ago. The program at UVic didn’t require us to choose a major, but I predominantly worked in painting and sculpture. I found great love in my sculptural practice, especially toward the end of my program when I started building figurative works, all fabric and stuffing and chicken wire, creating new characters that inhabited the same physical world as myself and narratives that I could step into for a moment. Sadly, I was lousy at documenting this work, and although I know that there exist colour slides here or there of my giant yellow human cocoon or of my doggy funeral, at this point, you’ll have to trust my words.

The years following my BFA I spent trying to find my place in the world. I moved back and forth across the country several times, packing and unpacking the same boxes, and ultimately deciding I couldn’t afford the storage space for these large sculptures. So I begrudgingly threw them into the trash. At the time, I was barely making any art, and the act of tossing my sculptures aside felt like a farewell bid to my artistic practice. But over time, the creative impulse was too strong, and in my tiny apartments from town to town, I began to draw. I drew until I found my voice in the penstrokes and marker lines.

And it’s not that I no longer want to continue this practice, oh no. It’s more that I know I have something inside myself to construct something larger, something that occupies my world, and that has the opportunity to affect viewers in a different way than I drawing can. And I want to do it. It’ll take an awful lot of commitment and time and sweat, but I really want to do it. So here I’ll begin to document the process of returning to the third dimension (possibly the forth should I try to incorporate video or kinetics somehow). And here we go.