Leah Beveridge
Degree Show Spreads: A look at the work of Leah Beveridge.
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I am interested in personal possessions & passions, collecting and hoarding. I like to explore them from a psychological perspective and am also curious about their strong links to consumer culture.
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I am just about to graduate with a BDes (Hons) in Textiles in which throughout my third and fourth years I have been specialising in Gallery Textiles. A number of the images are from an exhibition 'Maybe Next Time' in March 2006, in which I created an installation entitled "The Wrong Possibility?". This piece was a focus on my precious fabric collection and the fears I have of cutting into it, preffering to keep most of it intact . Along with my stack of fabrics, nicknamed 'the height of obsessiveness', I created a length printed with the photographs of each of the fabrics contained within the stack. I used this length to meake a coat, allowing me to use the fabrics without having to damage the collection.
For my Degree show in May 2007 I created an installation entitled "Hoarding". It was my aim to create an over-bearing, but interesting, space evoking the intensity of obsessions and compulsions. I have been fasinated since the beginnings of my project with the fact that a "hoarding" is also the name for the fences around building sites and billboards. I finally got to creats my own on the walls of my exhibition space, teamed with my shelves containing a variety of possessions ( collections of crates, boxes, tins and, of course, fabrics) which much of the patterned imagery derived from.
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Also included in this was a television showing a video piece entitled "Everything In It's Right Place?", previously exhibited at the show 'Between: Self And Others', March 2007. This piece was conceived from my personal quest to try to find the perfect system for organising my mountains of stuff. I think that everyone can identify to this in some way, living in a world of mass-production and mass-consumption and dealing with a constant bombardment of information, imagery and advertising. How much does the way we interact with our belongings reflect our state of mind?