Standpoint Futures presents Beth Richards: Ancient Scent

About

To conclude her Standpoint Futures residency at Chisenhale Studios, Beth Emily Richards will be sharing work in progress relating to her experiences with the Ancient Scent collective. Ancient Scent is a project responding to the life and works of the artist, writer, and magical practitioner Ithell Colquhoun. Since Winter 2015, a small group of artists and folklorists have been meeting in West Cornwall, where Colquhoun was based, to make work reflecting on Colquhoun’s engagement with landscape and megalithic sites, and her image-making, divinatory, and ritual practices.

Beth’s work investigates contemporary mythmaking, often exploring popular culture and its associated idiosyncratic subcultures. Frequently the work seeks to complicate macho narratives by re-performing them in ways that use absurdism and failure to undermine dominant histories. Past works have engaged with personae such as Harry Houdini, Robert Falcon Scott, Francis Drake, Arnold Schwarzenegger and William ‘Buffalo Bill’ Cody; as well as with social trends such as ‘tombstoning’ (teenagers jumping off cliffs into the sea), Mexican telenovelas, ‘80s-‘90s action films, roller derby girls, Western movies, scouting, and motivational speaking.

Beth Emily Richards is an artist-researcher based in Plymouth, UK. Recent projects include co-directing Video Social Club with artists Steven Paige and Rachel Dobbs, creative producing Social Making: Socially Engaged Practice Now and Next, and exhibitions including: Yes, It Really Happened at Exeter Phoenix; Understand Better at Biquini Wax, Mexico City; Cornwall Autonomous Zone’s Square Eyes at the Market Studios, Dublin and The Exchange, Penzance; Groaners at Videofag, Toronto.

Standpoint Futures visual art development residencies are for emerging/mid career artists, designed to be flexible and responsive to the project, needs and desired outcomes of individual participants. The residency's chief aims are to provide high quality, individualized opportunities to develop the artist's practice and career, and to integrate London and the regional UK art world to promote access and the exchange of ideas. Standpoint Futures is supported by Arts Council England and run in partnership with Chisenhale Studios. Regional partners are Plymouth Arts Centre and Castlefield Gallery Manchester.