Raised in a rural village in the Northeast of England, Forrest-Beckett’s home was built upon a filled mine shaft that buckled under the weight of two families embraced as a nuclear unit. As a sickly child, she observed her parent’s strong work ethic. When well, she would shadow her mother’s endless cleaning and decorating rituals. Growing stronger, she preferred the tools of her father’s trade, outside the confines of the home where she played the role of a ‘Brickie’.
The first family member to attend higher education, while saving to fund her undergraduate study she trained as a developer of database systems. A profession she would illustrate to her parents as; ‘an electronic form of building and cleaning a very tall, anti-Ballard ‘High Rise’ apartment block, where, akin to a Rubik cube puzzle, residents could be repositioned to live alongside one another, as equals, beyond systems of class’.
After graduating with a First-Class, Fine Art Honours Degree in 2007, she moved to London to catch-up on the world of contemporary art which had never been available to her growing-up. While working part-time in the capitals financial district, Forrest-Beckett witnessed the economic crash, in which, she has described the precarity of this economic meltdown as an undercurrent that would inform all of her practice.
During this time Forrest-Beckett was awarded a Creative Technician placement at Battersea Arts Centre, which was when she began to produce site-reflective installations beyond the gallery environment. Responding to two semi-derelict yet financially flourishing postcodes in the heart of London, in 2010, ‘Still Life’ and ‘Cleanliness is next to Godliness’ explored the notion of what it meant to cleanse an environment literally, socially, ethically and spiritually, through the appropriation of cleaning rituals.
By 2014, Forrest was awarded an Artists Access to Art Colleges (AA2A) residency, which was when her practice started to fully process the social impact of the economic calamity witnessed in 2008. Appropriating windows and their furnishings, Forrest began a psychologically charged ‘conversation’ with Louise Bourgeois’ ‘Cell’ series, but unlike Bourgeois dwelling spaces, her ‘Moratorium Series’, 2015-2016 were precariously counterbalanced, as a declaration of a potential breaking point.
Graduating in 2017, with an MA, Fine Art (Distinction) and a ‘Best Student’ award, as her portfolio of work began to reach new heights, while executing her calculated theories by putting them into practice, her physical spreadsheets ‘Blind Faith’ and ‘Flex’, and the converging and diverging forces harnessed within ‘{a violent intersection}’ and ‘Kalopsia’ were on the verge of collapse. Redirecting attention towards the agency of the digital, ‘(net, work}’ incorporated surveillance technology to live-stream and survey itself.
Upon graduating she was invited to spend 6 weeks exploring the Peak District’s mythology, topography and geographic histories, through collaborative and experimental practice, funded by Quad Gallery, in Derby, where she began to play with the hollowness of language and image. In ‘Rev{o,e}l{u,a}tions, 2018‘ she placed a virtual, live-streamed image of a domestic shrine within the gallery to locate her own personal myth making alongside the regions mythologies, while ‘The Mountain and the Cave, 2018‘ cross-examined contradictory proverbs, in which, her spatial arrangements followed the contours of the peaks and caverns of the Manifold Valley.
By 2020 she was awarded a prestigious 12 month Fellowship to explore the mattering of human-data communication by South West Creative Technology Network, in which, her work ‘Love by Proxy’ evolved through a laboriously slow process of ‘processing’ the meaning of a broken heart, which culminated in a wholehearted performance (or even a performance full of holes).
She is currently taking part in a 6 month ‘Critical Mass / Sculpt’ programme with Mark Devereux Projects to build networks that will help her work towards realising several ambitious installation proposals on a national, if not an intergalactic scale.