Flisan Beard
Flisan Beard is a multimedia and installation artist based at SPACE Colchester, Essex. Her work explores psychological experience: flashbacks and nightmares, the "haunting" and activation of memory, the repetition and reappearance of negative patterns, and forms of "active" forgetting. Her practice is experiential, experimental and reflective, and approaches taboo subjects through narrative, playfulness and dark humour.
She works with found objects, photography, film, and both traditional and contemporary media. People, environments, psychogeography, site-specific work and installation all serve her interest in relational dynamics. Her projects span art and science, social engagement, community participation, artistic interventions in public spaces and ecology. They include Cocoon Viewfinder, a public art commission for Hadleigh Country Park that responds to the history of William Booth's Salvation Army farm colony, and Donate a Hood, a community project on how patterns formed in early childhood shape present behaviour.
Alongside her practice, she is an HCPC-registered art psychotherapist and a BAAT-approved private practitioner and clinical supervisor, with experience in hospice care, mental health, paediatrics and education, and she runs socially engaged workshops.
Artist Statement
As a 'Maker' I cut patterns, make garments and childhood keepsakes. As an Art Psychotherapist, I identify patterns of behaviour and their root causes often learnt from childhood. As an Artist I explore childhood patterns through the metaphors of 'tailoring'. Unconventional materials are often used as pattern templates to portray the challenge of change in materials already fixed in their inherited form.
