Bethany Stead

About the artist 

Artist statement 

Bethany Stead (b.1995) is an artist based in Newcastle upon Tyne, and graduated from Newcastle University in 2019.

Bethany has exhibited at Gallagher and Turner Newcastle (2024), Newcastle Arts Centre (2024), The Crypt Gallery London (2023), SET Woolwich (2023), Newcastle Contemporary Art (2023) and Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art (2021). She was shortlisted for the North East Emerging Artist Prize (2024), Awarded the Baltic Artist Bursary (2022), and The Bartlett Travel Scholarship (2018).

Working across drawing, painting, sculpture and textiles, Bethany makes visual stories of image and object to form reimagining in response to socio-political barriers. Her practice attempts to explore bodily awkwardness, both biological and artificial, the history of bodily health, human connections to costume, the notion of worship and religion, and our relationship with the none-human sphere through the lens of class.

Metamorphic, animalistic, and anthropomorphic, drawings, paintings and sculptures stand as beings, residing within unsettling or idyllic spaces, caught in glances or scenes. Symbolism and archetypes thread through their work, influenced by intergenerational storytelling, their personal writing acts as a starting point for feelings and ideas, drawing on psychoanalysis, magical realism, science fiction and folklore. With a focus on image-making, sewing large paper surfaces, constructing their own sheets of paper-pulp and sculpting from paper wood and clay, Bethany seeks to challenge conventional representations of the human, creature and hybrid, restaging within queer spaces free from binaries.