If you’ve visited the InTouch Clinic in Janabiya recently, you’ll, no doubt, have spotted an eclectic selection of works by artist Beth Noble adoring the walls and dotted around the space. It’s her first solo exhibition in Bahrain, running till the end of January, and she explains that there are two sides to the pieces.
Australian Beth came here from Madrid, with her husband’s job, almost four years ago. She says: “I love it. For me it’s very exotic. People are friendly and I love the climate plus it’s interesting – there are lots of interesting stories, you get to meet people here that you wouldn’t otherwise but that can be hard when friends leave. You have to become comfortable with the transient nature. I have travelled to about 40 countries across the world and I think the anchor for me is my creativity. It’s my continuity.”
Her current exhibition is called Invisible: Revealing Everyday Beauty and it includes painting, sculpture, quilting, photography and recycled pieces. Beth explains: “It’s about how creativity reveals the unseen. I’m capturing and documenting the everyday things that people don’t see.
“There two sides to it. One side is almost about how creativity is therapeutic, how the creative act can take us from fear to love and it looks at grief and loss and love.”
Artistically inclined since childhood, Beth rediscovered her talents later on in life. She says: I was a high-achieving academic but became very depressed. I went travelling and began sketching and journalling. Painting allowed me to understand my own creativity. Since I was a small child, it’s always been a great hook for me to work through things and keep grounded. In 2004 I started painting at a friend’s home and I was thinking of the last time I was with my grandmother – it was emotional and I remember it still. It was a way of dealing with grief and loss.”
As she continued to travel, she adds: “I started looking at things around me. Didn’t necessarily paint, but looking at things around me, trying to simplify things. We see a lot of visual communication – I think this has grown a lot with media, social media and news but we need to take a moment to look at the trees and what’s around us.”
Returning to the show, she explains: “The other side is the invisible in terms of what we throw away. It’s invisible to us, but has an effect on us all. I have been doing plastic collages – photographing the plastic and using it in my work. There’s a part of one plastic collage that is an organic landscape, though it is small. From a creative point of view, I find it interesting. There’s another that looks like fabric – this is all recycled stuff, things that people don’t see as useful or beautiful, in their regular form.”
Expressing her gratitude to InTouch, Beth adds: “It’s an interesting space. There’s the waiting room where I’ve put plastics and ocean textures but then in the treatment rooms there are more intimate spaces. There I’ve used things like the sunflowers picture I took from a car window – it shows the anonymity of city living. It shows flowers aging gracefully but still beautiful and there are points of grief and loss – another theme on how creativity helped me through periods of transition and depression.”
Mostly self-taught, Beth says her work is a process of experimentation and developing observational skills. For the future, she’s planning to develop the plastic theme and also looking at memory and photographs.
