Bea Denton’s practice explores ideas around memorialisation, remembrance, ritual, death and grief.
Creative territories are divergent; sometimes without formal dimension or form; sometimes materially explicit. Her practice is interdisciplinary and experimental, performative and immersive. Projects are often undertaken collaboratively in social interactions and public contexts, responding to sites, and confronting norms and taboos. Projects and collections rely on duration and the sometimes repetitive act of discipline and labour to ferment and distil outcomes. Her work explores extremes of scale to manipulate acts of observation and interrogation. Denton is a collaborator in the artist’s research group, Throes of Grief.
"We live in a society whose newfound religion is self-worship and whose headline news is a celebration of public suffering and testimony. But despite this spiritual poverty it seems that we have a need for hope that is as great as our need to tell stories. Denton's work is about storytelling, although truth is not the issue - these are stories simply told which express recognition of something intangible in the way of things". Patrick Semple, Afterthought Press