My experience of life has always emanated from the home. From childhood to maturity home is the essential contributor to how I think and feel. It is a character cultivator and is a powerful force driving society and the economy.
First and foremost I am a mother and wife. These are roles I have put upon myself by design as is the role of artist. It seemed a natural progression then to marry the three concepts and take the concerns of my ‘wifeliness’ through artistic process.
House wife as facilitator has always had close links with the seasonal changes of the year, grabbing key periods to bring a family and community together. Abject commercialisation of these periods and a disturbing need for the instant launched a search for perhaps a slower pace of life – an appreciation of the good that comes from waiting - an admiration of the mature in a youth possessed culture– mixed up with a good look at what is taken at face value or considered traditional, certainly drives my practice.
Transformation by process is how my work is developing these days. Using homely techniques of cooking or growing or brewing or sewing, everyday ubiquitous items become art object or art experience: a celebration of the art of our mothers whilst at the same time critiquing the personal, social and economical implications of such ‘transformations’.
Biography
Born in 1964 into a RAF family we travelled extensively around the world finally settling in Aberdeenshire in 1980 with the lure of the oil industry. In 1982 I left home and moved to London for further education which didn’t work out and moved back to Aberdeen where I met my husband. We married in 1989 and moved to our current house in rural Aberdeenshire in 1990. My first child was born in 1992 and my second in 1993 and the children and my husband and the house have been my primary employment whilst supplementing income through various part time jobs.
In 2001 I decided to go back to further education and chose a BA Fine Art course offered at Moray College in Elgin. In 2003 I was offered a place in the sculpture department at Grays’ School of Art in Aberdeen and graduated with a BA(Hons) in 2005 having won the inaugural BP fine art award and a purchase prize from Robert Gordons University.
From there I went directly to work with Deveron Arts in Huntly on a two year residency funded by the Scottish Arts Council Partners scheme working closely with the local high school and community groups and developing my own practice. Works produced were mainly collaborative or interactive projects, interventions and installations synonymous with Deveron Arts directive of ‘the town is the venue’. Dotted in amongst this main work I undertook to exhibit in several gallery based exhibitions having my first solo exhibition in 2006 at the Foyer Gallery and Restaurant in Aberdeen.
At present the world is my oyster since finishing my residency with Deveron Arts and I am looking forward to undertaking new challenges.
Brief CV of Deborah Beeson
Muir Cottage
The Muirs
Rhynie
Aberdeenshire
AB54 4GD
Tel: 01464861387 Mobile: 07767848599 email: debbi@rhynie.vispa.com
Personal
Born in Elgin, Morayshire, in 1964. Married to Simon Beeson since 1989
Children Georgina aged 16 and Peter aged 14 and Basil the cocker spaniel.
Education
Re-entered full time education as a mature student of, initially, Moray College, Elgin, Scotland in 2001/02 entering Gray’s School of Art, Aberdeen in 2003, graduating in 2005 with BA(hons)Fine Art (sculpture)
Awards
Aberdeenshire Visual Artists Award Scheme – August 2006
Scottish Arts Council – Partners Award Scheme – Sept. 2005-07
Winner of the inaugural BP Fine Art Award 2005
Recipient of Robert Gordon University Purchase Prize 2005
Solo Exhibitions
Hyperborea – Foyer Gallery/Restaurant – Oct –Dec 06 (Aberdeen)
Group Exhibitions
Duff House- Banff – Feb-April 07
Elgin Library – February 07
Halloween in Huntly – October 06 (DeveronArts)
Wilderness-July-September 06 (Lecht Ski Centre)
In with the New – Jan- March 06 (Bridgeview, Aberdeen)
Graduate Contours II –Dec 05-Jan06 (East Kilbride Arts Centre)
Lemon Tree ‘Otherwhere’- Dec 05-Feb 06 (Aberdeen)
Magnetic North-November 05 (Peacocks Visual Arts Aberdeen)
Halloween in Huntly-October 05 (DeveronArts)
BraveArt 05-October 05 (London)
North East Open Studios-September 05 ( Brander Museum, Huntly)
RGU Degree Show- June 05
RSA Students Exhibition-March 05
Departure Lounge-December 04 (RGU pre-degree show)
Halloween in Huntly-October 04 (DeveronArts)
Residencies
DeveronArts Huntly Sept, 05 –Sept07 incorporating community projects/workshops with schools and adults as well as developing own work and practice.
Publications
Mrs Beeson’s Import(ance) of Trad(e)itions- 08
Pushing Out The Boat 06
Commissions
Forestry Commission – to design and provide 180 T-Shirts for Guinness record event for tree planting – May 06
DeveronArts – to provide and execute an educational programme in association with commission of Dalziel and Scullion ‘Breathtaking’ project -February 05
Rhynie Primary School- to work with children to create a mural to brighten up the playground - June 04
Text from publication
‘Mrs Beeson’s Import(ance) of Trad(e)itions’
ISBN 978-0-9555253-3-9
potARTo
Dr. Ken Neil
Head of Historical and Critical Studies
Glasgow School of Art
At time of writing, Debbie Beeson’s residency in the town of Huntly is drawing to a close after two calendar years. Fittingly, ‘An Artist for All Seasons’ was the rubric. The work produced and facilitated by Beeson over the months has reinforced the notion that prolonged and engaged creativity might wisely be a productive and perennial element within a community’s patterns of living. By contrast, of course, the world of urban-centred contemporary art (and much more besides) is agog with fashion, fad and fickleness. Beeson’s contribution to Huntly is to be seen on one level, then, as testimony on behalf of Claudia Zeiske’s Deveron Arts that patient and cumulative art projects are desirable and achievable in our epochal moment of short-termism.
So the exceptional duration of the residency has allowed Beeson to lift her sights beyond the strict parameters of conventional residencies, and the artist has dutifully taken a longer view. As a bona fide ‘Artist for All Seasons’ Beeson has indeed paid close attention to the seasons unfolding; but the work produced is as concerned with attendant anthropology as much as meteorology. Projects were devised with local groups to coincide with Pancake Day, Halloween, and Christmas for example, and vernacular celebrations resulted.
The closing project, potATo HOM(E)age, continues Beeson’s fascination with the intricacies of local customs: she sees remnants of aged behaviours in contemporary social habits, and she also unearths the environmental causation of those habits. And so it is that Potato Maze reflects on the relationship of the town, of any town, to its surrounding land and the potentials of that land for inhabitants over time by the will of the seasons and the grace of something.
To sharpen the focus of these themes for Huntly, the potato could not have been bettered as a 'lens'. The town was once home to a buoyant potato industry and the tuber is part of the historical identity of the area. Only recently the seed potato shop has shut, but surrounding agriculture remains rooted in the crop, and the townsfolk have an array of tattie recipes for every month of the year. The potato is, of course, a food for all seasons, a staple component of diet, an everpresent in larders and kitchens.
As part of potATo HOM(E)age Beeson’s ‘Tattie Tea’ in late September invited Huntly people and visitors to walk through a maze of colourful pots containing organically produced heritage seed potatoes. At the end of the maze was a garden shed which housed a makeshift potato spirit brewery. Participants enjoyed potato scones, cakes and took home pots of potatoes along with one of the many available potato-reliant recipes which Beeson collected from the locals.
To draw an analogy between the potato and the artist is too crude and no artist will thank me for considering it here. Nevertheless, in so doing, and please forgive me, we arrive at an important strand in Beeson’s artwork, safe in the knowledge that her allusion is more subtle than mine. To see the artist or the artwork not as a delicacy but as a staple, is to shift emphasis away from art as a special thing given by a special individual to a special few on special occasions. The artist will continue to be special in a way but, within the logic of Deveron Arts, they would be more numerous, and much more akin to a catalyst than a giver of discrete self-generated things.
With this as a possibility, arrived at through a reading of the potato’s ubiquitous usefulness and nourishment, the potent brew in the shed might stand for the heady mix which can arise when the ordinary is patiently catalysed over seasons by a creative agent – the strength of that agent being improved if a concerted, shared effort is made in the process. If the output is also generous in its relevance to makers and beholders, as is potATo HOM(E)age, then so much better the brew. The maze itself emphasized patience again, and underscored the notion that art works on us by way of wrong turns and dead-ends as much as anything else.
Deveron Arts has once more made the ordinary extraordinary by unlocking aspects of vernacular history and presenting them in the present with imagination. The lasting message from the ‘Artist For All Seasons’ might be, then, a twofold observation about creativity and community.
Firstly, and ideally, creative imagining should be a permanent resident of communities countrywide, harnessed with purpose to knit groups together across the cycles of the years in response to the foundations of their place. The still special but more common artist might well be present to encourage and sustain activity and production in various ways, for example, those tested and proved by Deveron Arts.
Secondly, more practically, such a vision might not normally be easily realized within communities beyond the good work of Claudia Zeiskes and Debbie Beesons. But where such cooperative activity does not manifest itself in an organized way, take heart, says Beeson, for the creative resilience of those who can, analogously, transform the everyday staple into something beyond the ordinary are themselves working away at the rearguard action against the onslaught of the temporary and the inherent banalities of the short-term.