Meet Beth McAlester

I’m Beth, 22 years old, a painter from Northern Ireland, now working in London. My work often examines biographical narratives relating to post-Troubles contexts. However, rather than directly addressing any overarching political system, I am much more interested in scenes or moments which indicate lingering trauma; weaving through a myriad of social and cultural realities to highlight the disenfranchisement and tribalism that is so prevalent all around us, especially today. I grew up in a place where so much is communicated visually through small details, signs, symbols, the atmosphere of a street, I think that quietly shaped the way I look at the world long before I ever thought of myself as an artist. I followed that instinct through my undergraduate degree and to where I am now.

The process of making a painting demands mediation and understanding, and as I move from a work’s inception to its completion, my understanding often shifts. The studio is the one place where all the thinking settles into something coherent. I think I’m drawn to painting because it forces a certain slowness that I rarely manage elsewhere; it’s how I organise my thoughts, my memories, the odd little fragments of experience that stay lodged in the mind for no obvious reason. Ultimately, my aim is to change the present by reappropriating these materials of my past. Using those charged narratives as sites for composition and, hopefully, for quiet but meaningful critical intervention.

In the months leading up to finishing my undergraduate degree, I made a real effort to seek out opportunities to show my work. I had been crafting this way of making and a visual language that felt very much my own in private, and there were frequent moments where I questioned whether my work would hold its weight beyond the safety of the studio. It’s a terrifying moment to find yourself standing at the threshold, looking out at the art world and wondering how on earth you’re meant to fit into it. Open calls became a kind of quasi-productive coping mechanism and I got used to sending application after application, aware that most wouldn’t materialise into anything. Still, that process built a lot of practical skills and gave me a clearer sense of how I wanted to represent my practice to others.

I heard about The Hari Art Prize because someone reached out and encouraged me to apply. Entering was an act of pushing myself at a vulnerable, transitional moment and I’m very glad I took that leap.

My submitted piece comes from a larger series that I completed as a part of my degree show earlier this year, comprising of 98 paintings focusing on the relationship between the my generation in Northern Ireland (often referred to as “Ceasefire babies”) and the land they are inheriting. Over the course of my study, a real fascination with the blank slate that youth presents in post-conflict settings emerged, raised in a period framed as peaceful, yet still surrounded by the visual and psychological remnants of the Troubles. The specific piece I submitted was the first in this series, made before I had really nailed down what it was going to be conceptually. It is a portrait of my cousin, one which I have defaced with a beard and glasses, possibly reminiscent of a certain political boogie man of years past, but who is to say. In the works I often use this type of graffiti, alongside tight cropping and unnatural photographic light sources to allude to outside agents and the identities they project onto the younger generation, a generation that never even had a chance to digest or understand these notions for themselves. I wanted to represent how conflict and its legacies filter into everyday life in this way, sometimes quietly and insidiously, sometime humorously.

Ultimately my aim was to ask what it means to be claimed by a place and what constitutes peace now, and this work was really a solidifying moment, materialising so many of the concerns I’ve carried over the last few years of my practice. Moving forward, I want to continue exploring these kind of mundane pieces of a bigger puzzle, letting them command centre stage through the act of painting, in a space where the visual rhetoric isn’t intending to draw support, intimidate or convince.

I’ve been wanting to push the scale of my paintings where appropriate and test out surfaces that were out of reach to me for years, so the funding allowed me to buy materials I’ve been pining over for a while now. The first thing I got when the funds came through was a dremel, self-etching primer and some aluminium panels. Maybe I’ll love working on this new surface, maybe I’ll hate it, but being able to try, without every experiment needing to justify itself financially, is hugely liberating. I’m relatively young and my practice is still in such a malleable state, so over the next year I want to deepen my material relationship with the work. I’ve just begun my postgraduate studies at the Royal Academy so the timing couldn’t be better, it’s the perfect place to focus on slow intentional development rather than any urgent output. Nothing in my next body of work feels off limits.

Ultimately, that’s the most valuable thing a prize like this gives an artist, the freedom to find out where the work actually wants to go, rather than where financial pressures or practicality might try to steer it.

Definitely, if you’re looking to bolster your career and showcase your work to a wider audience, this is the perfect chance. Winning the prize has been a huge honour, but there were real advantages long before I even knew the outcome. Being selected brought a level of professional exposure that’s hard to manufacture on your own, with the exhibition in Belgravia giving my work visibility and the online platform extending that reach even further. Even for applicants who aren’t shortlisted, the fact that your work is being seen by an influential jury creates an opportunity by placing your practice directly in front of people who shape the landscape you want to enter. With no application fee there’s really nothing to lose and everything to gain by putting work forward, and I really appreciate that The Hari Art Prize removes a barrier that stops a lot of emerging artists from even getting the chance to try. Another artist’s advice to me was that good art practice is one where you make decisions that have the potential to be embarrassing, and I think that extends beyond the studio with regards to putting your work out there.