HANDS AT WORK
Becky Brewis*1989
Becky Brewis uses the idea of land reclaimed from water as an analogue for the relationship between the conscious and the unconscious mind. She is interested in how a society’s landscape enters its stories. Dutch folk tales are often flooded by water and cloth-making is a recurrent theme. Using the traditional materials of the landscape — including wool and water — Becky makes drawings and film drawings that explore the parallels between turning flax into fine threads, turning marshes into land, and making narratives out of the rough stuff of human experience. She considers the images that get left behind when life moves on, and the many human hands at work over time.
Becky Brewis (1989) studied BA English, University of Oxford and MA programme The Drawing Year, Royal Drawing School. She was shortlisted for the Jerwood Drawing Prize 2017 and last year was selected by Tina Keane for Visions in the Nunnery, the biennial moving image showcase. Her work is about memory and the grubby handling of images over time. She is interested in how we edit the versions of past events we want to keep while, at the same time, the versions we don’t want to look at remain on the periphery of our vision. We do this with archives — both political and personal — and her work explores this process of image-creating and image-undoing through drawing and film.
