Felicity Beaumont
Felicity Beaumont is a multi-disciplinary painter whose work centres on the body, from viewership and objectification to death and decay. Working from a studio in Suffolk, she approaches the figure both physically and contextually, examining the universal experience of having a body alongside the many complex phenomena that come with it. Her practice moves between expressionist figure painting and portraiture, still life, and large abstract mixed-media works in which embroidery, weaving and natural and homemade dyes are worked into the surface.
She studied Fine Art at the University of Suffolk, graduating in 2019, and completed an MA in Fine Art at Falmouth University in 2024. Her MA project, Being With, was a series of large abstract embroidered works on cotton questioning cultural representations of the non-male body and the male gaze; it was shown at MF Gallery, Ipswich, alongside a discussion evening and artist's talk. She has exhibited nationally with Art For Cure, DrawFor, The Auction Collection, GoFigure Collective and The Ingram Collection, and was runner-up for The Ingram Collection's Young Contemporary Talent Purchase Prize in 2019.
She was one of five young creatives with strong links to Suffolk selected for the Young Artists in Suffolk residency at The Art Station, where she has also volunteered. Taking as her starting point the void left in the grass where a statue had once stood, she explored removal, traces and layering as a way of working through grief and loss, and began her Ghosts series through long periods of experiment with bleach and pigments. There she also started a durational piece, hand-stitching cloths, rags, canvas offcuts and plastic sheets used in her practice into a shroud that she regards as a physical ghost of her paintings. A later residency at Asylum Studios carried the Ghosts into shadows, silhouettes and figurative outlines, and placed these minimal, abstract works beside her bright, expressionist figures and portraits, drawing out the parallels between the different strands of her work.
