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

An exhibition that expresses the joys and complexities of an entirely autistic life understood only in retrospect

Installation view of “H. S. P. (or Promising Mid-Career Woman)” by Becky Beasley at Plan B gallery, Berlin, 2021.
Image Description: In a gallery space, dark floor and white walls, parallel to the viewpoint, there are four small stools with objects and a glass box on top of it. behind these stools, on the wall, four photographs with white frames. At the centre of the image, a salmon colour curtain in an “S” shape floats. On the right side of the curtain – in one of the semi-circle formed by the “S” shape, there is another photograph.

Becky Beasley presented the exhibition “H. S. P. (or Promising Mid-Career Woman)” at Galeria Plan B, in Berlin (Nov. 2021 – Feb. 2022). Her research 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.

The artist is thinking about “Undiagnosed progesterone intolerance and masked autism.” “Words are so clean”, she says. “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 bewilderment. 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”, the artist notes.

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.

‘Yes, please cut up the pieces for me,’ he said, ‘but don’t chew them.’
The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, 1797

The installation of four low, tabular sculptures, Me & You (1975-2021), in the final room of the gallery, were conceived in connection to a print edition by Christopher Williams for Koenig Books, which Beasley bought in 2018. At nearly two metres wide, the print was always going to be too big for her small home and she spent time imagining cutting it into pieces that would fit better. Of her decision to cut the print into four equal parts and incorporate them into sculptures, Beasley has written:

I like it best like this, not mine, in four pieces, inside a table, under my small sculptures, in a room, with other people around it, people I don’t know. This is ideal now.

The ceramic and photographic assemblages which sit under glass atop each of the table structures were created over time as a result of overhearing a yoga instructor refer to ‘the back of the heart’. For Beasley, this is an image which continues to fascinate her imagination.

Installation view of “H. S. P. (or Promising Mid-Career Woman)” by Becky Beasley at Plan B gallery, Berlin, 2021.
Image Description: There are two rooms in this picture. The first one, closer to the viewer has a light brown linoleum floor and at its centre it reads in a circle “Highly Sensitiv Person”. At the corner of this room there is a small vintage stool with objects on top of it and a glass box on top. Next to it, on the wall, a photographic print. The room at the back has a grey floor, a salmon coloured curtain a similar stool piece and photographs on the wall.

Finally, in response to Beasley’s polite communication to Christopher Williams’ gallery regarding her intention to cut and exhibit his print edition, Williams responded generously by also sending her another print, a poster this time. The work, ‘Me & You 1975-2021’, is her response to this gift, engaged through a series of light, yet decisive gestures: she rotated the poster 180 degrees, erased all the text content with a black marker pen, and framed the print in a rosewood frame under pale green glazing. The work is hung on the third, ‘P’ shaped, curtain structure.

“Fragments on Sensitivity”, a collaborative text was written by Becky Beasley and Anna Gritz to accompany the exhibition. Click here to access.

Becky Beasley (b. 1975) is Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at Goldsmiths College, London. She is a Hastings-based artist who works in sculpture, installation, photography, and writing. Solo exhibitions and performances include Plan B Gallery, Berlin; 80WSE Gallery, New York; Towner Gallery, Eastbourne; SKUC Public Gallery, Ljubljana; South London Gallery, London; Leeds City Gallery, Leeds; Spike Island, Bristol; Serpentine Gallery Pavilion, London and Tate Britain, London. She is represented internationally by Plan B Gallery, Berlin and Francesca Minini, Milan.