About

Beth Carter

Beth Carter is a visual artist based in Bristol, UK, and an Academician at the Royal West of England Academy, UK. Carter’s sculpture and drawings often morph the human figure with animal, creating mythological creatures and extraordinary fictional compositions. She is represented by galleries in the UK, the USA and Belgium and has work in private collections across Europe, USA, Canada, South America, Asia and Australia, an in the permanent collections of the Musée d’Art Classique de Mougins, France, the Muskegon Museum of Art, MI, USA and the New Salem Museum and Academy of Fine Art, MA, USA. She currently has work on-loan to the Commune of Mougins for public exhibition at the Chapelle Notre-Dame-de-Vie, Mougin, France, for the 50th anniversary of the death of Pablo Picasso.

Biography and CV Download (PDF opens in new window)


Further Writing

There is no dark until something shines …

Beth Carter’s award-winning charcoal drawings and sculptures revive old mythologies and revise them, taking recognizable figures and transforming them into allegorical symbols relevant to contemporary, lived experience.

A deer trophy and bull explode in flowers; the prior’s antlers morph into blooming vines while the latter’s stout stature gives it a decidedly hedge-like silhouette. How lovely, to imagine floral shrubs softly mooing as you stroll past? A man is dressed as a bird with a makeshift beak over his nose and cape ​qua​ wings held by outstretched arms. Is this theater? The next superhero? A charcoal drawing shows a seated minotaur beckoning to a crowd of small animals. Prey and predator alike emerge from the shadows to gather around his offered palm. This must be a dream. Or is it a myth? A prophecy?

Among ​Carter’s​ latest pieces is ​Giant Standing Minotaur II​, a reimagining of one of her most coveted and admired works. At nearly six and a half feet tall (200cm), the sculpture veritably looms. But surprisingly, disarmingly, it lacks ferocity. ​Carter​ somehow imbues the proportions and features of a beast with the sensitivity of a lamb. This dichotomy is her ​tour de force​. She is a master of juxtaposition. ​Carter​ conveys the allegorical and intimate with each stroke of her hand and leaves every surface raw from human touch. Her sculptures and charcoals are as much a Shakespearean drama as they are the emotional rollercoaster of any particular Wednesday.

Carter​ is able to finesse this fusion of the symbolic and personal because she is a storyteller. Each artwork is a narrative arch. Each piece is a poetic journey of introspection. Even the title of her exhibition could be a work of microfiction: ​There Is No Dark Until Something Shines captures the spiritual tenor of her oeuvre. In a world of black and white, ​Carter​ delivers a multitude of grey that provides a depth of compassion and an invitation to feel. She is the torch.

We are in the midst of a pandemic, political duress, and threatened justice— on a global scale. Now is not the time to be stoic. Most artists illustrate a level of empathy. ​Carter​ forces us to participate in it. To view her work is to experience oafish grace, brooding tenderness, and triumphant hope. As we continue to navigate the new normal, she urges us to be the weathered man wearing an ​ad hoc​ crown. Be the bouquet of bull.

Piper Ross Ferriter
Hugo Galerie, New York


Romancing the shadow through the work of Beth Carter

Anyone who shares Beth Carter’s fascination with the human condition must surely embrace the invitation to be found in her body of work. For here, among the richly detailed drawings and careful sculptures, we discover an unfolding meditation on those existential dilemmas that beset us all, and a world of its own in the making. This starkly beautiful and haunting world is both particular and universal, at once strange and immediately familiar, because it so powerfully evokes that forever surprising annexe of our own lives: the chambers of our night dreams, our subconscious imaginings, and our performances of gender and personhood.

These Carter chambers, magical and haphazard though they might at first appear, are constructed with considerable imaginative care. The use of charcoal in her drawings reinforces the night theme, as if the maudlin women, the strange animal-men, the consuming eyes are beckoning us into the shadows of our perceptions which sleep gives way to…and we aren’t always sure we want to follow. The peculiar and seemingly random choices of figures in the composition build to create a sense of wilful arbitrariness, akin not just to dreams but the playful irreverence of childhood; another of Carter’s preoccupations. In ‘The Long Way Home’ for example, a fox-man and a young girl hold hands while she steps away: are they dancing, or is he pulling her into the shadows of the woods beyond? So much of this imagery parodies the strange precariousness of a time when we were small – when we wanted to play but we could not be sure of our own perceptions and didn’t know who to trust.

The destabilisation of classical mythology within the lineage of sculpture is a consistent theme in Carter’s work, with bird-heads and cat-heads appearing as her less predatory take on the Minotaur legend. Cleverly, she can conflate and complicate those classical myths and those of contemporary masculinity at the same time. For example in ‘Minotaur on a Box’, we see one of history’s great symbols of rapacious hyper-maleness reduced to a slumping, defeated figure – evoking connotations of abashed, middle aged manhood. Perhaps, too, Carter’s ‘Free Reign’ horse-man sculpture could be read as an embodiment of the partly self-imposed constraints of personhood in society – on our physical, essential natures and desires – or, perhaps in gendered terms, the shackles of contemporary ‘manhood’ itself.

Such questions could occupy the viewer for hours, and this is work far more rewarding than much of the ‘art for artists’ that still claims so much space. In the accomplishment of Carter’s technique – the humanity in the faces, even the animal faces, through the careful lines, through the shading – she prompts a rare kind of empathy towards her subjects, making her a distinct force to be reckoned with in the world of figuration.

In many ways Beth Carter’s work is like a Jungian dream forest, where the shadow waits, and the ghosts of strange beings beckon and frighten, beguile and terrify in equal measure. Indeed, it was Jung himself who counselled the courting of the psyche’s shadow. Such Carter images as the minstrel at the entrance to the skirt-tent bring to mind the dwarf of Jung’s visions, who guarded the door to his unconscious. Except that in these visions, we are not kept out but invited in. To gaze, to meditate upon the work of Beth Carter is indeed to meet, to romance, the shadow.

Bonny Brooks