Lee Bethel is an artist working with paper.
For Lee Bethel, elegant constraints are the foundation of her workings, manipulating the fold, the grid and the seed. In her hands, the paper fold reveals its capacity for resilience and malleability. It is both a tangible folding of paper and a metaphorical folding of time and memory.
The repetition that Bethel employs is a contemplation on process work and time. The emergence of the grid in her early work was an act of memorium, linking with the handkerchiefs her mother would fold and prepare for her father. It has since become a formal classification system, its framework used to highlight repetitive and subtle differences in nature. The grid presentation allows for intricate readings of these natural forms. And if we expand the concept of the grid to a broader scale, it is also used to bring an ordering system to the landscape. Lee Bethel noted this on her residency at Hill End – an imposed order, the street network, had been overlaid on an unruly surface. The rusty wash introduced on her new works evokes this fluid landscape that has been subdivided and cut through with an ordering grid.
Lee Bethel's Flourish untwines the possibilities for formal extension in process work. The word itself describes both natural growth and a poetic physical gesture. In Flourish we might find those parallels between Bethel's variations on a theme and changing states in nature.
-Melody Willis
Lee Bethel holds a Masters of Fine Art, Honours in Fine Art and a Bachelor in Visual Communications from Sydney University, Sydney College of the Arts. She has shown in many group and solo exhibitions including the Sulman Prize at the Art gallery of NSW, the Rick Amor Drawing Prize, Ballarat Victoria, the South Australian Museum Natural History Art Prize, the Gallipoli Art Prize, Sydney, the Hazelhurst Works on Paper , Sydney, ‘ Beyond Books – a revolution’ at the East Gippsland Regional Gallery, ’Hidden’ Rookwood Cemetery Sculpture Walk, Sydney, Banyule Art on Paper, Victoria, Burnie Regional Gallery, ‘New Paper Old Land’, Tasmania and the James Kiwi Prize Wollongong Regional Gallery.
Lee was awarded a UNESCO Laureate to work in France, subsequently holding a solo show at Atelier Fourwinds. She has had a residency at Arthur Boyd’s Bundanon and two residencies at Hill End through the Bathurst Regional Gallery. In September this year she will be taking on a 1 month residency at Fremantle Arts Centre, Western Australia.
Her subjects are carefully selected and show a precise intersection, where materiality meets imagining.
Works available from The Egg and Dart Gallery 1-3 Raymond Rd, Thirroul www.egganddart.com.au
For Lee Bethel, elegant constraints are the foundation of her workings, manipulating the fold, the grid and the seed. In her hands, the paper fold reveals its capacity for resilience and malleability. It is both a tangible folding of paper and a metaphorical folding of time and memory.
The repetition that Bethel employs is a contemplation on process work and time. The emergence of the grid in her early work was an act of memorium, linking with the handkerchiefs her mother would fold and prepare for her father. It has since become a formal classification system, its framework used to highlight repetitive and subtle differences in nature. The grid presentation allows for intricate readings of these natural forms. And if we expand the concept of the grid to a broader scale, it is also used to bring an ordering system to the landscape. Lee Bethel noted this on her residency at Hill End – an imposed order, the street network, had been overlaid on an unruly surface. The rusty wash introduced on her new works evokes this fluid landscape that has been subdivided and cut through with an ordering grid.
Lee Bethel's Flourish untwines the possibilities for formal extension in process work. The word itself describes both natural growth and a poetic physical gesture. In Flourish we might find those parallels between Bethel's variations on a theme and changing states in nature.
-Melody Willis
Lee Bethel holds a Masters of Fine Art, Honours in Fine Art and a Bachelor in Visual Communications from Sydney University, Sydney College of the Arts. She has shown in many group and solo exhibitions including the Sulman Prize at the Art gallery of NSW, the Rick Amor Drawing Prize, Ballarat Victoria, the South Australian Museum Natural History Art Prize, the Gallipoli Art Prize, Sydney, the Hazelhurst Works on Paper , Sydney, ‘ Beyond Books – a revolution’ at the East Gippsland Regional Gallery, ’Hidden’ Rookwood Cemetery Sculpture Walk, Sydney, Banyule Art on Paper, Victoria, Burnie Regional Gallery, ‘New Paper Old Land’, Tasmania and the James Kiwi Prize Wollongong Regional Gallery.
Lee was awarded a UNESCO Laureate to work in France, subsequently holding a solo show at Atelier Fourwinds. She has had a residency at Arthur Boyd’s Bundanon and two residencies at Hill End through the Bathurst Regional Gallery. In September this year she will be taking on a 1 month residency at Fremantle Arts Centre, Western Australia.
Her subjects are carefully selected and show a precise intersection, where materiality meets imagining.
Works available from The Egg and Dart Gallery 1-3 Raymond Rd, Thirroul www.egganddart.com.au
Rosea Encaustic watercolour and seeds on hand cut paper 38 x 38 cms Available from www.egganddartgallery.com.au
