Bea Buckland-Willis

Beatrice Buckland-Willis is a Sydney based artist, with a passion for all things print. In 2020 she completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the National Art School (AUS), majoring in Printmaking. Much of her work utilises traditional print processes such as relief, intaglio, monotyping and screen.

As a young artist experiencing chronic pain issues, Buckland-Willis is concerned with the representation of female pain and subverting ideas of the ‘normal vs. abnormal’ body. Regularly playing with satire and parody, she wishes to break down the idea that art must be serious to betaken seriously.

Her practice is multi-disciplinary, combining traditional print processes with digital technologies, analog photography and installation, often employing collage and found images. Buckland-Willis is passionate about supporting women in print and has organised and curated exhibitions as a part of the Wasteland Series which are focused on subverting tropes of the suburban experience through the female gaze.

The Critical Collapse (construct) series explores themes surrounding chronic pain, and specifically, the challenges facing female-identifying individuals and members of the queer community in relation to the dismissal of pain and illness. Playing with construction imagery sourced from photographic ventures around Sydney's ever-evolving inner west, the artist has created a series of repetitive geometric patterns which overlap and intertwine into themselves. Printed onto rice paper and mounted onto plywood structures, the prints take on a three-dimensional form, slicing through the space. Simultaneously brutal and delicate, the installation is reminiscent of the healing body, and speaks to the deconstruction and reconstruction of the body - both physically and emotionally - post surgical intervention.