Blood Moon

The work of London-based artist Gabriele Beveridge (b. Hong Kong, 1985) is built through a language of subtle evocation, articulated most tellingly through a sculptural practice that employs a diverse range of materials, from the readymade to the naturally occurring. Absorbing the urban environment in which she moves and interrogating the materials that define its contours, Beveridge combines conventional display methods such as shelving systems and racks with organic shapes, reinventing their material ontology. Engaged through a dialogue that is as poetic as it is provocative, her treatment of object and material at once upends their commercial purpose. Such is the affective vocabulary of Beveridge’s work, and with her most recent sculptures presented for the first time in the exhibition Blood Moon, her materials begin to talk back. As part of her ongoing investigation with glass, Prophetic Souls (2024) concretises the umbilical relationship between prefabricated objects and materiality itself. Translucent spheres—supple, friendly, and organ-like—tumble through a modular arrangement reminiscent of a ribcage, yet too mechanical to bear any direct resemblance to the fleshy presence of a body. Beveridge’s Prophetic Souls view pattern as a prerequisite, wherein the symbolic disrupts the material logic of its support. In this way, her sculpture fluidly breaches the realms of realism and the imaginary: where consumer products turned readymade objects defy the „ism“ of Dada, the undulating movement of her glass spheres harken back to Surrealism’s call to gaze inwards. An open-ended compendium, the blood-hued works in this series are devised through a balance of recognition and contradiction; an unlikely relationship between organic movement and modular arrangement that speaks to the irreconcilability of elements that shouldn’t be compatible, yet somehow insist on coexisting. Working on the edge of what sculpture ought to feel or look like, Beveridge arrived at glass through photography, a medium she explored not for its mimetic qualities but as an object of interrogation. Analogous to photography’s ability to arrest an object in time, she captures a moment of transformation by testing the principles of glass’s fluid dynamics: molten, highly viscous, and malleable at high temperatures, the material becomes increasingly obstinate to the human hand that forms it as it cools. In Cords (2024), a tri-coloured sculpture made entirely of glass and positioned on a mirror, this arrested movement seems to perpetuate downward, always in motion and intrinsically primordial. By pushing the limits of the material, its form is delineated by the edges where colours coalesce into disappearance - Cords tenderly explores the spatial and temporal boundaries of this high-risk surface expansion, beguiling with the hardened presence of glass while subtly pointing to the absent fluidity of its creation. At several junctions in her practice, Beveridge has taken a decisive stance on display, engaging with the viewer‘s innate desire to assign a specific environment to which these display elements ostensibly belong. In the wall-based work For the Last Time (2024) the artist enrobes the display object in this contradiction: steel panels, traditionally used for shop fittings, are replicated in aluminium and treated through anodization, a process meant to reinforce the metal‘s durability. Rather than following the linear progression of mass fabrication, Beveridge’s application of colour chemicals freely drips and forms tidal washes, rendering the surface eerily fragile, glassy, weathered, even bruised. The works Blood Moon I,II and III (2023), a series of veiny marble slabs, delicately reveal the chronology of their geological strata in a sheer act of twisting: a minimal intervention in the face of relentless time, and a gesture that speaks as much of endurance as it does of finitude. Tacitly, works such as Blood Moon furnish us with the idea that even at its most subtle, movement may be the most rousing consequence sculpture has to offer. For all the ways that Beveridge’s work consistently asks us to notice oneself in the act of recognising the commercial genealogy of her materials, it has just as much to say about the natural forces of which they are an extension of.