H. S. P. (or Promising Mid-career Woman)
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picture_as_pdf - Plan B - Becky Beasley 2021 - v6 - PRINT.pdf
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subject - Supplemental Material
H. S. P. (or Promising Mid-Career Woman) is a coming-out exhibition by mid-career British artist Becky Beasley. H. S. P. expresses the joys and complexities of an entirely autistic life understood only in retrospect. Through the sensitivities of photographic, ceramic, and linen surfaces, the three centrepieces of H. S. P. are installations through which the paradoxes of the human need for intimacy manifest in alternatives that have become Beasley's trademark minimal approach to art making. How to live, how to speak, how to be together, how to be alone.
H. S. P. – an acronym for Highly Sensitive Person1 - is a lyric to sensitive surfaces and to the highly individual process of being a person in the world. The insistence of individual presence is expressed in the reverse printed negative - often present in Beasley’s practice, - but here expressed repeatedly, insistently across the exhibition. BACK!, she insists. BACK! BACK! BACK! BACK! BACK! BACK!
The reprise of Beasley’s last show at Galeria Plan B, ‘Depressive Alcoholic Mother’ (2018), in the form of the linoleum floor-work, Highly Sensitive Person, is an intentional déjà vu. The slight disorientation therein offers a tangible, uncanny experience of her own experience of late-diagnosis autism in the winter of 2020. Her personal research over the last two years led her deep into the fields of international medical negligence in female and hormonal healthcare and the ongoing misdiagnoses of atypical neurology.