ARTIST STATEMENT

A former Database Administrator, since 2015 Forrest-Beckett’s practice has been pushing the boundaries of the grid systems she felt confined working within.

Transfiguring digital processes into physical work, her process-based experimentations push the boundaries of compositional logic, in an attempt to breakdown the structure of underlying systems that can shape behaviour, with the aim of shifting mindsets and re-framing distorted thinking.

Navigating the influence of her parent’s work {building, cleaning, decorating}, her academic studies {Contemporary Art}, experience working with technology {Databases, Spreadsheets, Code}, her lack of experience with advanced technologies {Algorithms, Artificial Intelligence}, and the influence of adverse live events {identity fraud, a broken heart, financial insecurity, family disruption, a pandemic, a climate emergency, global unrest}, her practice explores the significance of what is inherited and picked-up along the way. And forming a mash-up from these sources, she pushes automation tools aside to build-in-time, in which, to slowly-process matters, as matter.

During the past 5 years supporting her practice with part-time work as a Change Coordinator within ethical and sustainable Finance, her approach to ‘work’ has been impacted by the transformative power of change that can be derived by attending equally to hearts and minds. While looking through a holistic lens to look at environmental systems and the framework which encompass individuals, events or phenomena and the dynamic relationships between them, a body of work has been in the making since 2020, that has become more balanced, being prone to incremental shifts rather than the pivotal, ground breaking scenarios of previous works.

In the works ‘Labour of Love’, 2020-ongoing, presented as ‘Data Voice’, at ‘Care/Dare/Share’, in 2021, at the Society Artistic Research 12th International conference, University of Bergen, Norway, and ‘Mummy: Stratified Relationship Series’, 2022-ongoing, published that year, in Issue 12: ‘Recording & Documentation’, Soanyway Magazine, both works incorporate laboriously drawn-out thought processes that were not made with the intent of figuring things out, but figuring what matters matter.

On mass, as {matter, matters} accumulate and content begins to fall out of context she takes a {psycho, techno, archaeological} approach to work with the {dis, ordered}, {ill, disciplined}, {mis, informed}, and {mal, formed}. Making connections between fragments of text, image, sound, and objects that have lost their place in the order of things, she references these disconnected pieces by compiling them through colour codes and a play on words and signs. Exploring the intermediary of what lies between form, media and reference, she generates a communicative logic in the form of a pattern language.

Most recent work has started to incorporate her love of film and music by incorporating elements of her ‘Filmography’ and ‘Playlists’, which give the components of her work a relational dimension. Introducing cinematic split screens to rupture the illusion of a frame as a seamless view of reality, alongside an eclectic mix of rhythmic cues that fall out of sync with their visual counterpart, skips and shuffles are required to attune to the matter in hand or find a groove, in which, to dance around the heart of the matter.

If Forrest-Beckett’s practice is not film making or worldmaking per se, perhaps it could be considered a form of multiverse that lacks any single ruling or guiding power, wherein, her patterns of work behaviour could be considered a process of re-formation, which is in need of bringing equal importance to the constraints and privilege that can prohibit or facilitate transformational change.

The overarching principle could be considered as centring around what could be termed ‘a mattering of incoherence’, wherein, she curates constellations within installations, as a manifestation of an inconclusive language.