Beth Horner

In my work I’ve been chasing a form of gothic sublime in the domestic everyday. Personal imagery is compiled, cropped, compressed, and pieced back together - physically and virtually - in composed, claustrophobic documentations of domestic life. Currently I’m making small scale works using handmade paper and plaster strips, ripping, painting and collaging the materials to create anxious, clustered spaces. Intricately rendered fragments lead into areas suggestive of decay and fragility, whilst representation sits on top of bulging texture, warping and abstracting spaces once familiar.

I often draw on the liminal in-between time of twilight to access moments suspended in transition, transforming familiar suburban settings into sinister, uncanny dwellings blanketed in mystery and quiet possibility. Glowing windows and apertures allude to hidden narratives the viewer is excluded from, putting emphasis on the separation between public and private. I imagine the work existing as a combined mental architecture, with corridors to different rooms, doors firmly closed and sites carrying the stain of memories or trauma.

With isolation, unease and the home having been the focus of my work throughout my time at the RCA, it has been a strange but also an interesting experience to have been thrust into this alternate way of life during the pandemic and try to navigate ways of working within it. Living and making within my subject matter of the domestic has given me an urge to open up the space in my paintings and let clustered areas breathe; definitely a reaction to my own walls closing in. The quietness of my work I have felt on the streets, whilst interiors are lit up in rows upon rows of orange squares.