Paul Beauchamp BackgroundCV 2006

Paul Beauchamp was born in Barrow-upon-Soar, Leicestershire in 1948. He studied at Loughborough College of Art from (1967–68) and at Hornsey College of Art, London (1968-71). He completed postgraduate studies at the Slade School of Art, University College London in 1973.

He has recently retired as Course Director of M.A. Fine Art at the University of Wales Institute, Cardiff and was co-leader of a European venture entitled “Sense in Place” 2005-06 between Wales, Latvia, Ireland, Spain, Iceland and Poland
He has exhibited widely in Britain, Europe and the United States and has been a former chair of Ffotogallery Cardiff and director of the Artists’ Project/Prosiect Artistiad.

Recent exhibitions include :-
“The Welsh Lens” commencing at The Museum of Modern Art Wales and touring to Switzerland and Italy.
“Boarders” The Museum of Modern Art Zagreb,Croatia and The National Museum and Galleries of Wales
“Aggregatzustand” Kreuzberg, Berlin, Germany.
“Educating Barbie” Trans Hudson Gallery, New York, USA.
“Global Village”, Royal National Eisteddfod, 2002, St Davids, Wales.
“Timescapes” Bay Art Gallery, Cardiff Wales.
“Transmissions” 2005, Tactile Bosch, Espacio Anexo, Sao Paulo, Brazil.
Galerie Wandelbar, Gstaad, Switzerland.
“Reflex” Llantarnam Grange, Wales.
“Coordinates 2005” Harlech Biennale, Wales.
Galerie Simple, Gstaad,Switzerland.

Extracts from the Catalogue 'Timescapes' written by Dr Jonathan Clarkson: current Lecturer in Art History and Theory at Cardiff School of Art and Design, U.W.I.C.

Throughout his career Paul has worked in a number of different mediums and is represented in various public and private collections including the Arts Council for Wales, Arts Council of England, National Museum and Galleries of Wales, University College London, University of Wales Bangor and Aberystwyth, The College of Charleston, USA, The Tate Gallery London, and The Contemporary Art Society of Wales.

Paul Beauchamp’s photographs take this notion of timescape as their starting point. Although many of the photographs are beautifully composed and rendered, they are arranged to ask questions about the visible world; they are an investigation of the site rather a simple representation of it. The quarries themselves are places that are usually out of sight, but here they are made visible and connections are drawn between the quarry and the society that produces it. The city of Cardiff is visible over the lip of Garthwood Quarry: the hill has been hollowed out to build that city. The quarry itself belongs both to the natural order and the civilized world: its terraces are both parallel and uneven.

On the one hand then, ‘timescape’ opposes itself to landscape, while on the other hand it works to subvert the binarism of nature and culture. Nature has long been pictured as a place of escape from the forces of industrialisation and civilization, but in truth there is no place on Earth, not the tops of the mountains nor the bottom of the ocean, that is immune from the effects of human activity. Beauchamp’s photographs are a vivid illustration of the extent to which ‘natural’ and ‘cultural’ processes have become inextricably intertwined. There is something wild about these places, they are unkempt and as empty of human presence as any moor or mountain and yet the trace of human activity is everywhere to be seen.

The photographs are mostly presented as triptychs and this format allows Beauchamp to intervene in the tradition of landscape photography and painting and question some of its conventions. Perhaps the most important effect that it has is to fragment the perspectival unity of the scene. The intervals between the photographs introduce a principle of discontinuity into the images that is quite unlike the spectacular totality that many landscapes pursue. They function as a pictorial form of non-resolution. The space between the images is like a cinematic jump-cut that reminds the viewer with a jolt that these photographs are material objects. Through the use of reflection, fragmentation and juxtaposition these photographs allow us, as viewers, to bring an important aspect of our relation to the land into focus.