2023 · Residency 58
Thomas Beale
Visual Artist
Artist Statement
I am interested in what may occur at the meeting point of the natural and the intuitive- how the process of art-making can transform the common, physical stuff of the natural world into something which resonates with one's subjective, interior state, and thus, in a circular way, bring a refocused consciousness to the physical world at hand. I work with found, natural materials- wood, shells, moss. The end-products of lives, these materials possess their own sensorial properties. I am interested in using these qualities, intensifying them, so that a viewer's final experience of the work is one in which there is no element of artifice- all the information is on the surface- and yet, the familiar has suddenly become strange and new.
Bio
Thomas Beale is a New York-based artist who works primarily with found, natural materials. He has shown his work internationally, with sculptures in the collections including the Museum of Old and New Art (Tasmania, AU), the Hood Museum (NH, USA), and The Bunker Artspace (FL, USA). He has been the recipient of numerous awards and honors including a National Endowment for the Arts U.S-Japan Creative Artist Fellowship, grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Kaplan Foundation, and others. In addition to his work in sculpture, he founded and directed Honey Space, an exhibition space active in Chelsea from 2008-2012, which the New York Times called "one of the city's strangest art establishments." Thomas is a graduate of Dartmouth College. He currently resides and works in the Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn.