Georgia Beaumont | The Sum Of Our Parts

About

In her intricate floral paintings, Georgia Beaumont presents a vision of the world as a place of lively interconnection. In some, tangled stems unfurl across the picture plane, creating kinetic points of contact between translucent leaves and petals, which overlap to create new planes of colour. In other works, pansy heads are linked by ribbon-like loops, forging a pattern of interrelation like a non-linear family tree. These floral webs speak to the power of relationships, wonder in the face of nature, and the pleasure of the unknowable.

This body of work came about after a formative trip Beaumont took with friends at the end of last summer, inspired by expansive conversations, the freedom of stepping away from everyday life, and the joy of finding coincidences of thought and feeling. In particular, the paintings draw on a moment in which Beaumont felt awed by a sense of the accumulation of the past in the present; the collection of tiny moments, chances, and decisions that determine the course of a life, on a scale from the molecular to the personal to the cosmic. The exhibition’s title hints at how the significance of human lives is forged from the accretion of the smallest details. The phrase “the sum of our parts” further suggests the potentialities of togetherness and collective thought, while also shedding light on the multiplicitous nature of our ecosystems.
The artist draws on the concept of panpsychism: the notion that consciousness is not limited to human beings, but is a force that permeates all matter. Under this formulation, the world is fundamentally alive and vivid rather than inert or dead. This, Beaumont suggests, could help us to feel empathy with the more-than-human world, rather than viewing it as a resource to plunder and exploit.

Beaumont has recently started to forge imperfect symmetries within her paintings, recalling the geometries and proportions of nature, in which perfection is perpetually balanced by the instability of organic matter. Nature’s paradox is that change is the only certainty; Beaumont’s paintings are inspired by the ephemeral indefinable moments in which one season shifts into the next, and how this echoes our internal propensity to transform through a series of constant tiny adjustments.

There are unknowable realms beyond the boundaries of the rational, which we all nevertheless experience. Beaumont is interested in the moments that offer glimpses into this unspoken domain, through encounters with friendships or the natural world, for instance. The paintings can be seen as portals to an escapism that eschews detachment, instead seeking a re-engagement with the material world through re-enchantment.