Symbols and images dance across Perth/ Boorloo artist Nathan Beard’s vast body of work, all connecting back to his Thai-Australian heritage. From photography and rendered sculpture to drawing, the multidisciplinary artist uses a range of materials, methodologies and archival research to playfully and thoughtfully investigate the layers of meaning in his cultural and social background and surroundings. Through his work, he brings a new perspective to age-old questions of diasporic identity, memory, authenticity and influence.
Beard is a Gertrude Studio Artist, working out of the studio space in Preston, Victoria.
Place
Nathan Beard: I moved to Melbourne at the end of June last year to start the residency program here for two years. It’s definitely created a lot of organic opportunities—you’re thrust in people’s faces a bit more than being in Perth.
This is not like my previous studio, which was predominantly storage of works. It’s much more of a working area because the space is such a luxury—so this is where I’ve been doing messier stuff, like casting and pouring things. I try to prioritise being here at least four or five days a week. There’s a new sense of discovery in getting to know the other people in the studio.
Process
Nathan Beard: I don’t really have a regular process; I work in very spontaneous bursts. Right now, the studio process is focused on repairing and remaking things and trying to finesse them. A lot of the time it’s basically forcing myself into a second space so I can commit to administrative duties—easing into the day with emails and things like that, the boring stuff they don’t prepare you for in art school. I’m pretty intuitive—there’s a lot of messing around on the internet and trying to find a spark for my next idea.
I did the research into the David Jones Art Gallery archive last August, so it’s taken a while to get these ideas off the ground and going, but I enjoy the luxury of moving slowly. I like pondering ideas, sitting on it and thinking through it.
Projects
Nathan Beard: I’m creating a single body of work across two solo exhibitions, Ratana at Sweet Pea Gallery and Sedula Cura at FUTURES next year. The common throughline is examining Thai cultural objects in Australian state and national institutions that were purchased from David Jones’s art gallery from the late 60s through to the 80s, when they would frequently have exhibitions of Thai and Southeast Asian art. I’m interested in the art gallery as a conduit between the commercial retail space and the museum; and status, taste and luxury. Not all of the works are going to be straight up reproductions but reimagined in the style of visual merchandising that would be relevant to the department store setting.
There’s an angle of it being reparative in a way, because a lot of these artefacts are not on display—you have to request collection views of them and access the bowels of these institutions. These are mainly Buddhist objects which have a function in a religious sense, as part of a ritual. They’re denied that through this lack of visibility. In a way, this body of work is about trying to re-present them.
The way that my mum decorated was ephemera, bric-a-brac, anything colourful and nice and shiny. It was a very earnest way of trying to elevate her own taste. Glass ties into that sense of ornamentation and decoration. It is a material that I’ve always been drawn to—it speaks to this idea of excess and ornamentation that I think is related to decoration around Buddhist Thai temples. I’m very interested in this idea of taking Thai artefacts and using technologies to try to reproduce them in an unexpected medium, reimagining them in a more esoteric craft way that speaks to a style of making more prevalent in Thai art historically.
I’ve used processes of casting and reproduction in my work before. The challenge here is that I’m trying to recreate objects that are traditionally found in other materials, like stone or bronze, but then reimagine them in another material.
The works for the FUTURES exhibition will be produced in cast glass, which is going to be more of an opaque form, and that is going to be produced through the assistance of Canberra Glassworks. Ratana for Sweet Pea is imagining works in blown glass through the studio of a glass artist named Ruth Allen. That’s going to be more hollow— translucent and glossy forms that are produced through the blowing of glass into a mould form as opposed to the heating and pouring of glass. So, you’ve got one show of solid, transparent forms, and one of ghostly, hollow ones.
I’m interested in exploring Thainess and the different contexts and influences that shape an understanding of what Thainess is, especially within a Western context—it’s very much rooted in biography. I’m interested in influences that shape perceptions or understandings and disrupting those expectations.
The sense of self-exoticisation that happens within Thailand and through diasporic Thai communities reinforces Western expectations. It reinforces the fraught nature of authenticity or the authentic self, and the slipperiness of these influences. That uncertainty is exciting for me because I think it can be expressed through a lot of different visual formats and materials.
Ratana was the name of my mother when she moved to Australia. It translates to crystal, or glass.
Ratana
Sweet Pea Gallery
7 December—18 January 2025
Sedula Cura
FUTURES
6 March—5 April 2025
This article was originally published in the November/December 20 print edition of Art Guide Australia.
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