CREATIVITY IS RIGHT ON TARGET

“I wasn’t a super social child. I used to sit and paint water lilies and paint them day in and day out.”

It seems that vivid childhood memory from her years at kindergarten set Beth Kay on a path that was always going to be a creative one – opening her first solo exhibition at Mount Gambier’s Little Blue Wren Art & Gifts and running until June 23.

“My earliest memory is doing art at kindy – I never played with the LEGO and didn’t go outside that much either,” she said. “I actually still have one of those early water lily paintings – I found it in a box just the other day.”

And while the kindy paintings are the earliest memory, Beth grew up in an environment rich in creativity. “My dad is creative – he is a graphic designer – and I did competitive dancing and was musical, I was just always had creativity around me.”

Safe to say when Beth hit Year 8 at school and art became an elective subject you could study as an option full time – she was first in line.

“It was a chance for me to really explore art a bit more,” she said. Beth attended St Martins Lutheran College until Year 7, spent Years 8-10 at Grant High School and then relocated to Melbourne when the family made the move.

Throughout those school years, her passion for art only grew, and she went on to study a Bachelor of Fine Arts at RMIT with plans to then complete a Masters and go on to be a teacher.

What was set to be chance to immerse herself in art in lecture theatres and studios alongside fellow students was soon stymied by the pandemic and 18 months of lockdowns.

While her study continued – it was in isolation – and when she reconnected with her primary school crush Matthew, a return to her childhood home became priority one.

“We reconnected over the internet while I was in lockdown and we started dating long distance and after six months it just seemed like it was time to move back to Mount Gambier,” Beth said.

That was not just a life changing decision in her personal life but also her art practice. It was when her thoughts moved from teaching art to becoming an artist, in her own right.

“My plan was never to be an artist – I just enjoyed it as a hobby,” Beth said. “The plan was to be an art teacher and the reason I did the Fine Arts course before the Masters in Education was so the majority of my study would be focussed on art and the creative side of things.

“And it was in my final year of my Bachelor of Fine Arts that I started to realise I wasn’t really sure that (teaching) was what I wanted to do but I also thought I was so far into the plan already.”

But she changed tack and despite putting her artistic energies into her own practice rather than a classroom, she does teach art lessons and is about to embark on teaching a drawing fundamentals course.

The fact she has already secured an opportunity to unveil her first solo exhibition has vindicated that leap of faith and it came about almost accidentally.

“A friend suggested I go and have a look at the Little Blue Wren Gallery and that’s all I was doing there at the time but Tabatha (co-owner) and I got chatting and before I knew it we were arranging an exhibition,” Beth said.

That exhibition – titled The Feminine Art of Mark Making – could also be classed as a collaboration, or at least, partly inspired by her husband Matthew. It is a creative collision of fine art and firearms, the collection reimagines the traditional accuracy target as vibrant geometry and uses rifles to create powerful marks through the canvas.

Basically Beth has merged her passion for art with one of her new passions – shooting – a hobby she has taken up alongside Matthew. “It (shooting) was one of his hobbies and he took me shooting and as shooting became a bit more of a focus for me I started thinking of ways to marry the two,” she said.

That saw her starting to almost doodle on the completed targets, which evolved to colouring and then she started designing her own targets with geometric shapes and suddenly she was inspired to create a new body of work.

“It was just a fun experiment and was never intended to be anything but as I continued to explore, it did become something and here we are with an exhibition.”

At first glance this abstract offering is a giant leap for the little water lily painting girl who, unsurprisingly became a young artist fascinated with painting landscapes.

“I would take photos every time we went out,” Beth said. “Mount Gambier has so much more green than Melbourne. We did live near the Bay in Melbourne with beautiful views but coming down here and having so much greenery and trees was amazing.”

Beth has continued to evolve as an artist though, through both her studies and life.

“You learn that making art is about what’s happening or how you are feeling,” she said. “I did study abstractism through university and had been encouraged to always push things further.”

One of her university assignments that shaped her philosophy going forward was where she had to draw the same item 50 times.

“I always liked colour and contrast, even in portraits, and breaking it down as to the shapes involved and how the light falls on those shapes,” Beth said.

It saw her develop a style where she was creating two and sometimes three toned portraits where they still looked like a person.

That style saw her exploring geometric shapes more fully and somewhat ironically, after telling her father she had no interest in his field – graphic design – she had a strong design component to her work and now, her art practice.

After continually creating art over her three years of study and the work for her Little Blue Wren exhibition, Beth has just enjoyed a less frenetic six months in the creative space.

“The rest time is a big part of creativity – you can’t practise art all the time,” she said. “I think I needed the that time, that break from it and now I can come back fresh.”

That has seen her packing her small notebook with her again so she can draw, sketch or jot down ideas as she is out and about.

Beth’s first ever exhibition was the group exhibition with her graduating class which was an unusual experience because it weas the first time many of the students had met face to face, given their course ran through the pandemic and lockdowns.

Now she has added to that experience with this solo offering. “Both have been very different experience, which has been awesome,” Beth said. “It has been a chance to learn about what it takes behind the scenes, on the admin side of things to put on an exhibition and I know each place I exhibit will be a different experience and that will be exciting.”

Next on the agenda in terms of exhibitions is an opportunity for Beth at The Riddoch Arts and Cultural Centre in the middle of next year – an opportunity she applied for at the end of last year as it was the only gallery she knew in Mount Gambier and she wanted a chance to showcase her work.

“It will be new work – I think it will be different from my current exhibition but at this stage I don’t know what it will be.”

PHOTOS COURTESY OF LAEL NEWTON