Jenny Beard West Yorkshire, United Kingdom

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Jenny Beard (b. 1994) is a Leeds-based artist from Barnsley whose abstract, textural paintings explore digital aesthetics, dissociation, and working-class identity. Influenced by Action painting, Meta-painting and Postdigital art, she works mainly with oil, acrylic, and mixed media on canvas.

Jenny Beard is a contemporary artist, working within abstract painting. Driven by the materiality and physicality of the medium itself, Beard would describe themselves as a “painter’s painter”. There is an ongoing dialogue between digital aesthetics and traditional methods, in which Beard explores the push and pull of styles and processes, perfection vs error. Reverse entropy is at the core of Beard’s aesthetic. The artist explains this as a process in which an element is reduced down to its pure essence, such as a painterly gesture. A tangible, physical, and painterly mark made by human hands can be represented by a monoline “brush” on a digital tablet screen. This is the digital filter, which can then be reversed and repeated to recreate again on canvas, with real tools and viscous paints. This process highlights the representation of time in a mark, the scale of the human gesture, and the error of the human hand, bringing life to a style which edges the boundaries of perfection and logic.

Automatic drawing is used to create compositions, at all stages of Beard’s process. Attention is paid to the overall weight and balance of a piece, depending on instinct. Some paintings appear to have floating elements, while others sit top heavy, awkwardly with interruptions, or create a pressing feeling. Beard draws and adjusts until the composition feels right, but never expected. For Beard, the automatic drawing nods to dissociation, in which the artist reflects on their own experiences of dissociation throughout their life.

Another of Beard’s processes is note taking. These notes consist of individual reflections; snippets of overheard conversations, questions, rambling monologues, or protests. Texts are selected and used in the paintings, either as small compositional elements, framing, or even the main subject. The text generally has an undertone of humour, self-deprecation, and stoicism in some combination. The themes align with Beard’s lived experience as a northern working-class woman in the arts, with the fatigue of this situation sometimes being at odds with their nurtured resoluteness.

Although the choice of text is therapeutic, it is the act of including it which is prescriptive for Beard, the act of opening up, speaking out, and allowing themselves to be heard. There is space for unity with the audience, or potentially discord. So whilst the automatic drawing and physicality of the paints are physically grounding, the inclusion of text is mentally grounding.

As well as creating dialogue with the audience through text, Beard aims to create immersive and intimate experiences, using scale to draw viewers in, or specific hanging choices which interrupt the usual flow of observation. For example: hanging bodies of work in tall vertical configurations which disrupt the usual horizontal eye line, placing works in hidden spots, or hanging paintings which appear to “cut” into the ceiling or floor. These curatorial choices, along with the aesthetics and formats, raise questions about how we absorb media within the digital sphere and experience images and paintings in the present day.