Bea Buckland-Willis

Beatrice Buckland-Willis is a Sydney based artist, with a passion for all things print. In 2020 they completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the National Art School (AUS), majoring in Printmaking. Their practice is multi-disciplinary, combining traditional print processes with digital technologies and experimental installation - often employing collage and found images.  As a young artist experiencing chronic pain issues, Buckland-Willis is concerned with representations of pain and subverting ideas of the ‘normal vs. abnormal’ healing experience. 

Buckland-Willis has coordinated several curatorial projects with a focus on supporting emerging artists and other under-represented communities within the art world. Passionate about supporting women in print, in 2020 they coordinated and curated two exhibitions as a part of the Wasteland series which were focused on subverting tropes of 'suburbia' through the female gaze. More recently, their curatorial project Multiply (2021) created a virtual space for emerging printmedia artists to showcase their work without financial barriers.

Their work has been showcased at art spaces including; The Cutaway (Barangaroo), AIRspace (Marrickville), Artsite (Camperdown) and 321 Project Space (Surry Hills). In 2021 they were selected as a finalist in the Blacktown city art prize, and exhibited with the Other Art Fair as a part of the New Futures Program supporting emerging artists. They are also a 2022 recipient of the Megalo Printmaking Residency (Canberra).

#24 | Uninterested, 2022, lino print and collage on paper, 21 x 29cm, $110.

I was originally drawn to printmaking due to the multiplicity of the medium, which challenges the traditional fine arts notion of the 'masterpiece'. As I delved further into the world of print, like many printmakers I ended up with strange leftover pages, incomplete editions and random failed plates. It was in second-year art school, inspired by a peer that I began the practice of holding onto these pieces and re-purposing them through collage and I've been in love with the process ever since. These collages act as a compositional outlet for me to play with pieces of failed prints, found images and stream-of-consciousness poetry creating a resource I can return to for inspiration when creating new prints and editions. I think in many ways they can be more useful to me than my more completed works.