Biography
Beth Carter is a visual artist based in the UK and an Academician at the Royal West of England Academy. Her sculpture and drawings often morph the human figure with animal imagery, creating mythological creatures and extraordinary fictional compositions. Her work is exhibited internationally and is represented by galleries in the UK, USA and Belgium as well as being held in private collections throughout the world and in the permanent collections of the Muskegon Museum of Art, MI, USA, the New Salem Museum and Academy of Fine Art, MA, USA and FAMM (Femmes Artistes du Musée de Mougins), France.
In 2023 Carter’s work was loaned to the Commune of Mougins for exhibition at the Chapelle Notre-Dame-de-Vie (Mougins, France) as part of events to mark the 50th anniversary of the death of Pablo Picasso, and in 2024 by the Levett Collection to the Louvre Lens for their Animaux Fantastiques exhibition.
Carter has subsequently been invited to be the artist for ‘Mougins Monumental 2026’ with her sculptures exhibited throughout the village for the duration of the year.
Artist statement
“The human and animal relationship is an ancient and complex one, our history and evolution are deeply intertwined with animals, as well as our cultural and spiritual lives. Ive been using animal imagery in my sculpture and drawings for over 25 years its become a both personal symbolic language and a lens which allows me to explore themes such as duality and transformation – power and vulnerability – I’ve found paradoxically that using combinations of animals and people somehow conveys our human concerns or predicaments more directly than the human figure alone, it’s as if they by-pass our intellect and speak directly to our psyche and emotions and to the dreaming intuitive parts of ourselves.”
Returning to the work of Beth Carter after first encountering it back in the 90’s is always a pleasure and like a favourite novel or work of music, always offers something new with the passage of time, the change in circumstances both personal and public and the growth of one’s own consciousness through relentless experience. Back then figurative and classical art seemed all but consigned to the Art History books as Concept Art and Installation Sculpture grabbed all the headlines and TV Culture Magazine limelight. For me it was a relief then to encounter her work as it exemplified the classical and figurative virtues I so love whilst seeming crucially fresh and contemporary as well. Now fully established and cherished internationally, Carter’s work can be seen to be part of a larger movement back to the ancient and sublime forms of Egypt Greece and Rome which disappeared largely with Rome’s fall until rediscovered in Renaissance times and developed by the Italian schools creating a through line from Apollonius’ Boxer At Rest, Donatello’s David, Bernini’s St. Theresa and right up to Degas, Rodin and Maillot from where Modernist abstraction began to dominate only to reemerge at our Millennium in the work of Carter and her contemporaries. Of course Carter never imitates anyone. Instead she has created her own world, Carter-world I like to call it, which reaches deep down into Mythology, childhood fantasy and dreams, into her own childhood and her own unconscious to create forms which explore her own psyche and our collective unconscious in equal measure to spark our imaginations and touch our hearts and souls.
Her oeuvre is a laboratory smorgasbord of creation. At once Dr. Frankenstein, a mischievous Olympian God or Mother Nature herself, Carter is compelled to create forms, impelled by some inner compulsion to imagine and mould in three dimensions creatures who seem to mirror our own existential condition. She embodies in her menagerie the pain of life, the inevitability of suffering and the agony of the divided self in the face of a shockingly physical destiny. Her ‘Minotaur (The Giant)’ is a monster created by a vengeful god condemned to rule with violence and pitilessness his absurd labyrinthine domain yet still under layers of bitter experience, a boy or angel… a spirit ‘thrown into the world’ as Heidegger described the existential origin of us all. Carter is always like Francis Bacon; the artist and never the illustrator.
Yes! Coming back to Beth Carter’s fabulous work is like coming home in a way, like Odysseus’ return to Ithaca, coming back to your own childhood dream of self, your own private mythology of self, your own peaceful psychic shore after many rough adventures in actual life with all their lingering scars, all the guilt of trauma’s violence bestowed and received, the games of domination lost and won, back to your own private fabled place in the pity and compassion of all creation.
Roddy McDevitt