A former Database Administrator, since 2015 Forrest-Beckett’s practice has been pushing the boundaries of the grid systems she felt confined working within.
Pushing technological automation tools to one side, to build-in-time, and slowly-process digital matters, as matter, she forms {digital, physical} mashups, made-up from familiar aspects of work that have been inherited or picked-up along the way {building, cleaning, decorating, writing code to clean, build and manipulate data structures}, alongside processing adverse life events {identity fraud, financial insecurity, family disruption}.
On mass, as matter(s) accumulate and content begins to fall out of context, she takes a {psycho, techno, archaeological} approach to unearth the {mal, formed} and {mis, informed}. And using the grid as a device to map physical and mental correlations that she makes and tracks through colour codes, and a play on words and signs, what emerges through her human-computer mediated investigations, is a form of pattern language.
In recent work, she has begun incorporating elements from her ‘Playlists’ and ‘Filmography’, wherein, cinematic split screens rupture the illusion of a frame as a seamless view of reality and an eclectic mix of lines from films scripts and rhythmic cues fall out of sync with their visual counterparts, requiring deep listening to attune to the matter in hand or skips and shuffles, in which, to find a groove and dance around the heart of the matter.
If Forrest-Beckett’s practice is not film making nor worldmaking, but quasi-objects and pseudo-artefacts with edited revisions that trace her attempts to figure what it feels like living within a complex multi-verse, which lacks order, any single ruling or guiding power, and always subject to change, then perhaps 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.