Beth Collar

Beth Collar develops a multifaceted practice that moves between sculpture, drawing, installation, and performance, using these mediums to probe the psychological and cultural frameworks that shape human behavior. Her work often captures the tension between past and present, evoking echoes of older social codes, spiritual beliefs, and ritual gestures while situating them within contemporary contexts. By doing so, she highlights the uneasy contradictions that define how we see ourselves today. Central to her practice is an engagement with objects of ritual, mysticism, and divination, and the ways such artefacts have historically mediated power, faith, and emotional response. Collar looks in particular to medieval religious art, a period in which sculpture was used as a potent tool of persuasion—teaching, admonishing, or stirring empathy through its physical presence. This ability of form to embody and transmit extreme states of emotion continues to inform her approach. Rather than reproducing these traditions, Collar reimagines them in fragmentary and sometimes unsettling ways, creating works that channel both vulnerability and authority. Her sculptures and performances operate as sites where history, mythology, and subjectivity converge, offering a space for viewers to reflect on how narratives of the past persist within the present. ...