Beatrice Hasell-McCosh

Beatrice Hasell-McCosh‘s work uses natural form as the lens to explore emotional themes, identity linked to place and human connection. Drawing is vital to her practise and she uses closely observed studies made from life to make large- scale paintings back in her studio. Beatrice works as much from memory as from the studies and, in playing with scale, the focus of importance gives way (from direct figurative representation) to a flattened abstraction of those shapes with aesthetic choices relating to composition, texture and gestural use of colour taking on the primary importance. With a degree in English and Classics reading widely around a subject is central to her practise. The titles of each large work cite the disparate elements of this research from literature to pop culture, song lyrics, politics and art historical links.

Beatrice’s current work is a series of monumental paintings and a central concept for her is of work presented in parts. This motif began after a trip to Japan in 2018 where she discovered kintsugi which is the idea of beauty in imperfection or in broken elements. This has been significant in her thinking since then and it is seen in a number of her works where the different elements of the triptych or diptych are uneven. As a twin she is naturally attracted to multiple parts that make up a whole. Her influences are wide ranging, from music to Disney productions set design, comic book strips, 1950’s adverts, Chagall’s stained glass, the freezing of a moment in poetry and the traditions of tapestry and wallpaper making.

This series has grown out of Lockdown in 2020. As humans shrunk away from each other during the global confinement the reassuring continuity and cycle of nature became completely absorbing to the artist who watched and drew from the same spots continuously seeing plants grow up crowd together blooming and dying and being replaced with the new. This was when she began working in much larger size and in changing scale so dramatically from the original imagery the painting becomes a much more physical space which surrounds the viewer. Reality becomes simply the material fact of the paint rather than the subject itself.