#153 Beth Mellett, Vacancies
25 June - 1 August
Thursday - Sunday, 12-6pm
Opening: 24 June, 6-9pm.
All welcome. For visitor information click here
Beth Mellett (b.1995, Liverpool) lives and works in London. She studied BA Drawing at Camberwell College of Arts, graduating in 2018.
In Vacancies, Beth brings together a collection of recreated objects and structures that she has encountered in person over the past year.
She is interested in how the everyday can become eerie. At what point do things begin to feel haunted? Is it the emptiness, the quiet, or the unknown?
Each of the objects in the show have been isolated through digital processes and have gone through a cycle of flattening and expanding, shifting between the second and third dimension to then finally be brought back into existence through large scale vinyl prints.
These images have then been brought together in a new shared location, removing them from their original context. Beth invites the viewer to explore these transported objects, attach their own memory to them and haunt the gallery space.
A conversation between Charlie Barkus and Beth Mellett at OUTPOST Gallery, 19th June 2021.
Charlie Barkus: Your work explores an idea of real and perceived space, along with digital and physical imagery. I was wondering if this idea of a real and perceived experience was something you were exploring with this show?
Beth Mellett: Yeah, with the work that I make there is always the question of how is this going to exist in the real world? So, I like the fact that it’s flat on a print but it’s not on the wall, it is in the space. You have to walk around it and be next to it. There is an object and there is you, and you can understand that object because it is probably something you have seen in real life. You see a bench or a gate or something similar, so you kind of know how that is meant to look, or feel, or how big it is meant to be next to you; but it is slightly off, it’s not quite perfect and it is obviously a representation. The digital object is within a white space and is artificially lit, there are shadows to the image that help lead you into the 3d-ness of it potentially physically existing - but you’re also aware that is actually a trick. There are then shadows and light in the physical gallery space, like a repetition.
CB: This perception of space, how has the last year impacted it for you? It has been a long time since we first contacted you and I was wondering how has your work changed over the last year in response to being locked inside due to the pandemic at all?
BM: Yes, It has kind of happened slowly in a way. So when we were first talking, I knew I wanted to explore horror, as in, what kind of objects in the everyday remind us of recurring elements of films or pop culture. These references that I started looking at had a kind of blueprint, a lot of things were fictional, exaggerated and very obviously linked to a particular ‘spooky’ aesthetic, a kind of fantasy. Then through the summer last year, when I was reading and working on things, I kind of lost my steam a little bit and slowed down. When we started to come out of the first lockdown, being able to go on walks and see more things out and about in the everyday helped. That’s normally how I come across things and get inspired by it. So if I see a really interesting element of a building or I see a strange streetlamp or something that just stands out to me. I will take lots of photo’s of that, keep it in a folder somewhere, and maybe it will jump back out at me at some point. When we went into lockdown in November it was almost like going back into those feelings of quietness and slowing down, I could only see the same things in my local area and it became a bit limited. So the focus came back onto these places that I could see a lot of. I think public spaces like parks took on new functions during lockdown for a lot of people. One of the pieces is from a park near where I live and the bandstand is again quite local to me, somewhere I could walk to and see. They repeated themselves a lot and I have almost attached a meaning to them.
CB: So there is almost an element of memory to them as well, so does digitising them capture that memory, or does it change the way they are viewed?
BM: I feel like that by making it digital I have taken it from that original location and have moved it into this gallery space but also into a digital space which removes it from everything else that was originally there. By doing that it changes its status, for example that green ornate bench in the show is from the V&A and you can’t sit on that bench - which is kind of strange because it feels like it has gone from being a useable object, to a gallery in one place, and now I have transported it as an image to the gallery here. People sort of recognise some of them as well which is interesting to this idea of memory being changed. I was speaking to someone who recognised the shelter image and they were asking me about where it is from? “It looks like it’s from this beach near Norfolk” and I was like “no, it’s from a beach on the South Coast”. It’s a generic image so it can be referenced to different places but I like that everyone kind of takes it and puts it in a new space, because it exists in a neutral space in the gallery and digital void. It is a bit like a sketch of a memory that has changed and evolved from the original thing anyway, and I like that other people will evolve it again themselves.
CB: We talked earlier about this element of horror that is evident in your practice. I was wondering if you could talk about what impact it has on your work?
BM: That originally came around as a lot of work I have done previously has looked at interesting architectural elements that have caught my eye, but I have always been interested in how wealth, or very grand buildings, can be presented. So, I was kind of thinking about these big haunted houses you see in cartoons and films, they are always these huge, big empty places. I was researching where they came from, why that particular image has stuck. There was a point in time in the US when people would build these huge mansions in this Queen Anne or Victorian style, where it almost feels like a collage of a building, there is a lot happening. So, they would build these huge mansions, have them for a bit, then financially if something changed and they couldn’t upkeep them they would go empty and fall apart. They became this image of horror, Edward Hopper’s painting ‘House by the Railroad’ referenced this, and then from there in Psycho they referenced Hopper’s image, and it gets recycled and used again and again and again until that to us is no longer, oh it’s that style of architecture, but it means that’s a house with a ghost.
So, I was looking a lot into that because I like this idea that this grandness can transform into something unsettling. Once I came away from the imagery of that I wanted to explore what that looks like now, what that looks like in the future. This was before COVID was really in the frame, so I wasn’t thinking about isolation or anything from that point of view originally, it was just more what no longer gets used anymore. One example I came across were these big massive shopping malls that become vacant and have this sense of eeriness or creepiness, but it’s much more contemporary visually. I was thinking, what is it about those places that make it scary? and it’s that quietness, emptiness, lack of people. That sense of if there is nothing there, it tricks your mind with this fear of the unknown, looking over your shoulder kind of thing. I think then going out and about and seeing this beautiful bandstand in a park with no one around, with no music playing, not living up to what it’s original intention was, it was having the same sort of feelings. I thought I could bring these ideas together and show some of these everyday moments of quiet and emptiness. I think that’s why I like the word vacancies for the show, it’s also not permanent, it suggests that these places and objects can potentially change and transform.
CB: What’s your favourite colour?
BM: I don’t know, probably black.
Photo credit: James Coy
