Fox and Pheasant Sculpture

Working within the realms of a sculptural tradition where the symbolic use of animal imagery is a potent and continuous source my work creates allegories by, amongst other things, integrating the human form with animal forms. The resulting imagery holds both a timeless significance and a contemporary relevance despite and because of our separation from the natural world. It is important for me that my sculpture and drawings are accessible on an individual level as well as implicating more archetypal themes common to human experience. Currently live and work in Bristol, UK "Anyone who shares Beth Carter’s fascination with the human condition must surely embrace the invitation to be found in her body of work. For here, among the richly detailed drawings and careful sculptures, we discover an unfolding meditation on those existential dilemmas that beset us all, and a world of its own in the making. This starkly beautiful and haunting world is both particular and universal, at once strange and immediately familiar, because it so powerfully evokes that forever surprising annexe of our own lives: the chambers of our night dreams, our subconscious imaginings, and our performances of gender and personhood. ¬¬ These Carter chambers, magical and haphazard though they might at first appear, are constructed with considerable imaginative care. The use of charcoal in her drawings reinforces the night theme, as if the maudlin women, the strange animal-men, the consuming eyes are beckoning us into the shadows of our perceptions which sleep gives way to...and we aren’t always sure we want to follow. The peculiar and seemingly random choices of figures in the composition build to create a sense of wilful arbitrariness, akin not just to dreams but the playful irreverence of childhood, another of Carter’s preoccupations. In ‘The Long Way Home’ for example, a fox-man and a young girl hold hands while she steps away: are they dancing, or is he pulling her into the shadows of the woods beyond? So much of this imagery parodies the strange precariousness of a time when we were small – when we wanted to play but we could not be sure of our own perceptions and didn’t know who to trust. The destabilisation of classical mythology within the lineage of sculpture is a consistent theme in Carter’s work, with bird-heads and cat-heads appearing as her less predatory take on the Minotaur legend.