LEE BETHEL

Keeping Time

26 June - 20 July 2024

Lee Bethel’s studio is a luminous laboratory in the bush where encaustic wax bubbles away, works in progress are laid out flat and resource piles of torn rag paper are near to hand. For the artist, each exhibition is a record that is being extended and a form of timekeeping. In contrast, the studio is a place of process where forms grow within an elastic quality of time. As the artist states: “All of this work can go on forever. It goes outside its perimeters. That’s what the grid does – it contains or expands. I am still doing that with this work, it is just not that logical grid anymore. As I look around these woven and curved rather than straight forms, the dynamic of the grid is still there, but moving within time.”

The studio is also a place where physical processes and ideas run together. Lee Bethel speaks of the ongoing project Counting The Dead, a record of Australian women murdered in circumstances of domestic violence. As she states, Keeping Time is “mainly about women’s bodies and what is happening to women, and the awakening of a lot of people to the continuing violence.” The organic physicality and scale of the pieces, the dynamic edges, bodily symmetries and curves speak to this contemplation. Bethel’s abstraction contains an emergent symbolism, mostly felt through the evocation of wing-life forms and shields. She has been looking at historical paintings of angels to understand how artists painted the attachment of angel wings to the body and how they made it “feel right.” That which beats in all their lives is a powerful example of this investigation with its creamy translucent wax, mirror alignment and radiating forms. In contrast, works like Darkness is about to pass are “like charcoal, a burnt piece of peeling bark” and “shield-like”.

The works in Keeping Time are like a register, taking stock of what is lost, with a refusal to be forgotten. Radical rage is present but the works are neither silent screams nor memorials. Abstraction is a condition where life can be evoked beyond words and forces are made evident. A grid underpins each piece but it shifts with the tides. Lee Bethel offers sustenance with insistent femaleness, an appreciation of pattern without prettiness and a lushness that forces structures to expand and take new forms.

Lee Bethel is a prolific mid-career artist and active exhibitor. Recent solo exhibitions include the remarkable Diva (2024) exhibition at Woollahra Gallery which presented her intricate hand-pierced watercolours. A Way With Words (2022) was a solo presentation at Hazelhurst Regional Gallery curated within a “Quintet” of significant artists from the region. In that exhibition, Bethel presented cut paper installations that explored women’s domestic life and craft traditions. In 2023, Bethel was a finalist in the Hazelhurst Art of Paper prize, the Calleen Art Award at Cowra Regional Gallery and the Flow Contemporary Watercolour Prize.