Becky Beasley: H. S. P. (or Promising Mid-Career Woman)

About

H. S. P. (or Promising Mid-Career Woman) is a coming-out exhibition by mid-career British artist Becky Beasley. H. S. P. expresses the joys and complexities of an entirely autistic life understood only in retrospect. Through the sensitivities of photographic, ceramic, and linen surfaces, the three centrepieces of H. S. P. are installations through which the paradoxes of the human need for intimacy manifest in alternatives that have become Beasley's trademark minimal approach to art making. How to live, how to speak, how to be together, how to be alone.

H. S. P. – an acronym for Highly Sensitive Person1 - is a lyric to sensitive surfaces and to the highly individual process of being a person in the world. The insistence of individual presence is expressed in the reverse printed negative - often present in Beasley’s practice, - but here expressed repeatedly, insistently across the exhibition. BACK!, she insists. BACK! BACK! BACK! BACK! BACK! BACK!

The reprise of Beasley’s last show at Galeria Plan B, ‘Depressive Alcoholic Mother’ (2018), in the form of the linoleum floor-work, Highly Sensitive Person, is an intentional déjà vu. The slight disorientation therein offers a tangible, uncanny experience of her own experience of late-diagnosis autism in the winter of 2020. Her personal research over the last two years led her deep into the fields of international medical negligence in female and hormonal healthcare and the ongoing misdiagnoses of atypical neurology. 

Undiagnosed progesterone intolerance and masked autism. Words are so clean. How do the societal effects of this manifest individually? Debilitating depression, serial burnout, exhaustion, stigmatization, bullying, gas lighting, social death - not being experienced by others as a person - social exclusion and bewilderment2 . Being endlessly bewildered by others is terrifying. To be bewildered is, etymologically and experientially, to be sent into a wild place without road map. It is to be astray in oneself. Beasley describes her late autism diagnosis as ‘possibly one of the strangest of happy endings’– not exactly happy and certainly no end.’

One possible response to, ‘Back!’, is, ‘From where?’ A pair of small gelatin silver-prints of a striped shirt hang tenderly, back to back within the two spaces created by an 'H' shaped curtain structure. A 25- year-old, un-exhibited photograph, Me as Andy (1996), made by Beasley at the age of 20, shows her made up, wearing a wig, looking directly at the camera. A photograph of a 1930’s ceramic Ilford photographic film processing tank hangs alongside Me as Andy, within the intimacy of curved spaces of an 'S' shaped curtain structure. The photographic series, ‘BACK!’ is formed of seven life-sized photographs of a German-branded glossy black paint pot - used to paint her early sculptures for photographs made in Berlin in the early 2000’s - each of which has been toned a muted colour, creating a uniquely personalized pastel ‘rainbow’ which circles the walls of the gallery’s main room. Beasley’s ‘over the rainbow’ palette comes not from Disney, but from an inter-war watercolour by British artist, Eric Ravilious’s, ‘The Bedstead’ (1939). Back, she insists, is here, in all our returns, and the exhibition a celebration of diverse collective recoveries.

Beasley took up ceramics in 2019. Fascinated by the direct malleability of its form in relation to the imaginary and its potential for surface chemistry application – akin in ways to the chemistries of the photographic surface – H. S. P. includes her ceramic artwork for the first time in exhibition in the form of small assemblages of books and ceramics. Books – novels, mainly, often in abstracted, ergonomic forms - have been central to Beasley’s practice and here they appear as themselves, as a set of influences, whimsical guides and supports. 

1The Highly Sensitive Person by Elaine N. Aron first published in 1999

2 For similar, incredible accounts of late-diagnosis autism in those who identify as female, listen to The Squarepeg Podcast: https://squarepeg.community/podcast/