Nathan Beard

Hi everybody. I'm Serena Bentley. I'm the senior curator here at the National Portrait Gallery and I'd like to begin by acknowledging the traditional owners of the land, the Ngunnawal, Ngunawal and Ngambri people and pay my respect to elders past and present and by extension to any First Nations people with us today and acknowledge that sovereignty has never been ceded. It gives me great pleasure today to introduce Nathan Beard.

So Nathan is a Perth-born, Melbourne-based artist. He's an interdisciplinary artist working across a range of media, photography, sculpture, installation, who often draws on his own personal archive and family archive as a means of exploring broader ideas of identity and the diasporic experience and ideas of tines and nationalism. We're going to keep things super casual today, very casual chat. There will be room for questions at the end. But to begin with, I'm very curious. You do have ties to Canberra. Is that right? You have family connections here?

Yeah. After my mum and dad married, they initially relocated to Canberra. My dad was working for the federal police at the time. And so Canberra was my mother's first experience of Australian culture. And she hated it because it was. was the middle of winter, I think, when she moved here. Also, she caught a plane to the wrong city. She ended up flying to Sydney instead, and so my dad had to leave, work early and drive to Sydney to pick her up from the airport. So that's my little bit of family law. Did she become acclimatised to Canberra? Look, she didn't have to suffer through it for very long. I think they moved back to Perth about three years afterwards. So she had to enjoy three winters. Okay. Okay. All right. We'll talk about a bit more about your mum. But in the first, instance, it's really interesting how the family archive or these personal materials and photographs are incredibly important to your practice and sort of the basis of the basis of a lot of your work. What is it that motivates you to use this as material within your work? I think for me it's that the images managed to simultaneously evoke a sense of familiarity and exclusion and because of this tension that exists in images of family who I recognize situated in context which are unfamiliar to me, that's what I find sort of like a really generative space to work in, thinking about how visual material and found imagery can sort of be used as a starting point to stir up, I guess, more, yeah, more rigorous ideas of displacement and identity. Yeah.

And so if you're using source material of photographs, say for instance, from your mother's past from a time before you were born, do you find that that evokes a sense of closeness to her as well, or is it about trying to connect with her in different ways? Yeah, definitely. I think a lot of the interest in working with these sort of found images is that technically they might not have a lot of resolve or polish, but through the act of like selecting them and choosing to expand a generous amount of time working across the surfaces of them. It's a process of like adding value to the imagery and forcing them or thrusting them in front of an audience as a way of sort of like elevating the material. And for me, that gesture essentially is like this form of affection or love or placemaking as well. Yes. And that is so, so palpable in your work that that degree of reverence and sensitivity for your subjects is so tangible, I think, particularly when you look at the works that were included in Bloom here. But maybe if we focus first on Siamese Smize behind us, so these are images, I mean, essentially all of the works included here are kind of about your mum, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And in direct and indirect ways. Yes. And so behind us, these images that were found or the source materials found from her home in Thailand, is that Correct. So shortly after my young, my grandmother and my mother's side passed away and sort of the early 90s. By that point, the house had only been unoccupied for about 10 years. So then we went back there and this is before I started school. We were living in the house for a little bit, and my brother was being homeschooled there. my older brother. And then, yeah, my mom and dad left Thailand after trying to sort of start there after my dad had sort of retired, except it's like a redundancy package.

And then the house was essentially like boarded up and closed again. So within there, there was sort of like family artifacts, clothing, furniture and photo albums that were sort of sat untouched while that house was essentially sealed for another 20, 25 years when it wasn't occupied. part at all. And yeah, it was next door to my uncle's place. So he was sort of like a custodian over the house and made sure that there were no squatters or anything like that. But it's a very small province. Everybody in the Kong knows each other. So all the families, you know, very respectful of the space. But then going back there for the first time in over 20 years in in 2013, 2014, it was this sort of treasure trove of images that, immediately evoked a nostalgia for a time which I vaguely recognised because the images kind of stop where I was there, the more recent images in those albums. So yeah, that's the sort of origin story behind this sort of like wealth of photographic material. And the images in this series in particular are all pictures of my mother when she was very young. So probably just before she had met my father as well. Yeah, right. And so they're all dated from around the mid to late 70s. Yeah, and it's very, it's very much a huge selection of portraits of her and her friends and other family members in front of these plain backdrops that were taken at local dances and things that were held at the temple, I'm pretty sure, the local temple in the Conny York. Yeah.

And let's talk a bit more about the way in which you kind of subverted or or complicated these images. Because obviously you're dealing with this personal family history, but at the same time, often in your work, these strands of popular culture come into play. So if we think about the title of the work, it's called Siamese Smize, which I really appreciate being a fan of Tyra Bank. So Tyra Banks is the supermodel who popularised the term Smize, which means smiling with the eyes. And then also we've got the use of the Swarovski crystal as a material, which is something you've observed as like a contemporary fashion trend. So can you talk a bit more about the popular culture aspects that you've subverted in these works? Yes. So the term smiles is essentially smiling with the eyes. And in these images, they're riffing on the idea of the Siamese smile, used as sort of like a touristic slogan to promote travel to Thailand, and that movement sort of started in the 1980s. and it's a sort of slippery area to explore coming from a Thai perspective because there are so many micro variations on smiles that carry different cultural meanings depending on the context. And this is all information that sort of gets very lost from a Western perspective if all you're consuming is this idea of a smile being sort of in something that's in service. And so the Smize portion of this comes from the fact that I'm deliberately obliterating like facial cues through these masks of crystals.

And so the subject's mouths are floating above the surface of them, but the smile is sort of contained in the eyes. So that's the little Tyro Banks throwback. Also in cycle six of America's next spot model, they did go to Thailand as well as part of the go seas. Yeah, so that was the international destination. So there's like that little extra thread as well. with regards to the Swarovski crystals as well, they specifically evoke the use of glass ornamentation that's threaded throughout all sorts of Thai craft and design. Buddhist statues, Buddhist shrines, temple displays and traditional costuming and dance costuming all have sort of fragments of mirror or polished glass or sometimes like stones that are embedded throughout as this form of decoration. And I was sort of fascinated how more contemporary trends towards design in Thailand on shrines incorporate, like, literal Swarovski crystals being hand-applied as well. And they sort of evoke like, yeah, flashy iPhone cases and all of that sort of stuff. So like, when I started working Swarovski crystals in these photographs, it was because I went to Thai marketplaces to sort of buy shrine statues and shrine materials like gold leaf, but then at the same stalls, I'd see women just sort of like hand-applying. stones in the back of phone cases.

And the stones were also sold at this same shops as well as materials for sort of decorating and adding this sense of reverence to domestic shrines bases. And in terms of the labour involved, just out of curiosity, so these are hand-applied. Yes, yes. How long does this take you? To cover, I timed it once, and it was shocking to me, but to cover an area about this. about this big, using lots of irregular crystals to tessellate them very tightly and together. It takes about an hour. So you kind of have to expand that and multiply it for each thing. With some of the patent ones, I was tracing the lines of the patterns on the surface of photograph and able to sort of like fill in those sort of like mosaiced areas. But yeah, that labour required has to have the small crystals next to the bigger crystals because it creates a more dynamic flash when you walk past themselves. So they reflect the light much more dynamically and viscerally than if it was sort of an even layering of the same crystal size. Yeah. So it's like a tessellation? Yes. Okay. That sounds stressful.

Yeah. Yeah. It's a lot of pushing stones around in while the adhesive is that syringe applied is still a little bit wet and accommodating so you can kind of slide things in place and they'd lock in. Wow. Okay. And is that relaxing and meditative for you? Or are you doing other things at the same time. No, very relaxing. When I was making this series, there used to be YouTube compilations of entire seasons of America's next stop model. So each like compiled video was about seven to nine hours. So I would, you know, there's only like 16 seasons that I could work through. So like I obviously watch more than that in the creation of the series. But yeah, it was definitely a back of mind. Now in terms of where your work is situated here, most of the work of Nathan's and in Bloom is in this room. There's another sculpture in Gallery 6. But this room is essentially a space of matriarchal intensity. This is a space of power women.

We've got some philanthropists who've been involved in the establishment of the gallery. We've got a former Governor General. We've got a Sydney socialite. And we have Noi Beard, Nathan's mum. And so obviously we've talked about her a little bit. And obviously mothers are so formative and influential on all of our lives. But she seems like she was an incredible supporter of your practice and collaborator. Like, how is she infused within your practice? My, she was a very, you know, generous but sort of hesitant subjects a lot of the time. But I, my interest in sort of exploring this idea of Thai culture is formed through the matrilineal bond. everything that I was sort of raised around with regards to sort of tines and my understanding of it came through her and her efforts to incorporate elements of her home into the house that I was brought up in in in Perth. So from things like religion and domestic shrines around the house, the garden and the types of fruits and vegetables that she would plant there, that sort of reminds her of home. to sort of religion in the sense of like going to temple for specific Buddhist holidays, the army of Thai women and aunties that she surrounded herself with. There was just like all of these elements that sort of added up to an experience of Thailand outside of it. And I was interested in the sort of slipperiness of it and the contradiction and how authentic that experiences. But also the sort of potential. within that to sort of like really stretch broader understandings of like what it is to constitute like a national identity in an era of globalization and mobilization as well. This sort of experience of like the diasporic individual in the middle of it sort of blends a lot of those edges and can be sort of like a really liberating space. So also a really confined one as well, a really limiting one. but yeah, so her as a conduit to sort of channel these ideas definitely made sense while she was available to me to use as a subject. Her experience as a migrant, like a lot of that, the reason why I was wanting to focus on her as a person was to elevate the status of her as a sort of overlooked person in society as well and sort of give a sense of preservation around her and sort of to archive her and to elevate her and to elevate her within a context that sort of sits outside both of us as well. Within that, I'm sort of aware of like how it speaks more universally to other people as well. Although I'm working from a lens specifically of Thainess and Thailand and my relationship to it, my fraught relationship to it, how slippery the edges of it are, I think it's sort of approachable from much broader understandings of place and self and how you create meaning out of the the inheritances that you have as well.

It's so interesting this idea of slipperiness because, yes, you're dealing with these very intimate relationships with members of your family and your own personal experience and you're infusing them with all these other influences from popular culture from Tyra Banks. How do you traverse those spaces and continue to honour your subjects? Like, yeah, how do you move between authenticity and authenticity. I think it's generally reflective of a sense of a sense of play and wanting to use sort of a lightness or I guess a flashiness to draw. people in initially. So, yeah, it's a lot of the times the work that I make situates itself between the sort of playful and serious as well. Yeah, I just think that that sort of attention is really fascinating or generative for an audience and it's also quite inclusive as well. And I think maybe another thing that draws people in, particularly with the work that we're sitting next to here is. actually beauty. And so this work when it was unpacked downstairs was quite astounding to see for the first time. It's exquisitely beautiful. And you can see that care and labour involved in its fabrication. Can you tell us more about it? So the work is titled Noi, after my mum's nickname, which is the Thai word for little or short. And originally was presented so that the eye line of it was sat around her eyeline as well. So when you were walking around in a space, you were kind of like looking her in the eye. And the work is made up of cut up strips of the Thai silk sarongs and one sort of synthetic floral slip that she wore around the house. But Thai silk sarongs that she would wear usually for special occasions. And those special occasions were generally focused around Buddhist holidays at Temple. So there was traditional times. patterns and fabrics that she would adorn herself in as a sort of beacon of cultural pride. And then she would, yeah, wear those to temple as a way of sort of impressing the rest of the Thai community around her. Everyone would be wearing the same sort of sarongs together. It's really quite a nice little thing to reflect upon. But after her passing, most of the clothing that she had with her was in Thailand and donated. cremated alongside her.

So these were the sarongs that were left behind in Australia. There was this sense that like these were the items of clothing that she was intending on returning to and that she was valuing enough to sort of like keep behind so that she could still like adorn herself and dress herself with. The Bai Sri itself is a an offering that's generally left at shrines and it's produced to sort of bring good fortune and auspiciousness. And it's usually made from carefully pleaded and folded strips of banana leaves and banana stems and usually has like floral embellishments on the top of it as well, like marigolds and different buds as well. And the idea behind them is that they're made out of this sort of perishable material. They end up returning. Bananas grow in very, grow very resistant. in all types of environments and muddy soils. So symbolically, they're this symbol of like regeneration and growth. And so I also was drawing on a fabric versions of Bai Sri that you can buy to have these sort of like permanent things in domestic shrine spaces as well. They're not too dissimilar to the use of artificial flowers. Like preferably you'd use fresh flowers in a shrine setting, but sometimes you just want to have like the plastic version of it as well. well just to sort of have as this beautifying feature. So the challenge was how to sort of of materially think about letting go of objects and repurposing the fabric from her sarongs in a similar way to the pedal embellishments that were made out of fabric that were attached to these sort of like commercially available Bai Sri. And so yeah, it was a process of sort of sort of cutting into very thin strips and hand folding and stapling and then pinning, removing a staple, and then slowly making my way down the cones to sort of like build this stretched out form that is, it's an exaggerated form of a bias. Some of them can be very sort of over the top and lux. This is based on a simpler form of a Bai Sri, but with its own sense of elongation and sort of manipulation of scale in there as well. And yeah, the other remarkable thing was when I was going through a lot of the other clothes that she had left behind. So much of it was floral printed as well.

So there's this incorporation of like a cheaper, more comfortable slip that she would wear around the house for as opposed to this sort of like stiff formal silk that sort of weaved into there as as well. The idea behind the work was to create this sort of like monument to her taste and sort of like create an impression or an idea of her through her material belongings and let go of those and generate a form that sort of abstracts this sense of portraiture of her as well. The other thing is that the intricate leading is borrowed from like a very traditionally feminized form of labour. It's generally women that make the Bai Sri in a temple. And so it's the aunties and the nuns that would gather around and they would be the ones holding strips together and stapling them and pinning them together, using really provisional materials like foam blocks and bamboo skewers and staples as the sort of support structures for everything as well. So all of the sculptures by you included in this exhibition are essentially based on floral forms. On the inverse to the beauty of Noi, there is an heirloom behind us here. And I feel like a lot of us have gone on a complex journey with this sculpture. And when this sculpture was unearthed downstairs, I think a lot of us had quite strong body feels when we saw it for the first time.

You know, there is a degree of objection at play here. But funnily enough, I feel like the longer you spend with it, that tenderness that is present in so much of your work becomes palpable. And interestingly enough, when we we were installing it. Obviously, it needs to be held very gently. We were holding it like a precious baby. And obviously it's studded with some of your mother's jewellery. And so there's a real sense of kind of intimacy and pathos once you get past the freakiness of it all. I mean, that was obviously intentional. Yeah. Yes. Yeah, it's interesting to think about how when I was the thinking of This idea of inheritance and the material, sort of archive that I was building to, you know, compliment the photographic one and how I draw upon that to make work about Thainess. My mother's jewellery was like a pretty big part of that as well. She famously liked to wear all of her jewellery at once or carried around in a purse with her because she was paranoid about it getting stolen. So she would always have all her rings, like her ears would have both of those pairs of earrings in them all the time. And only until recently when coming in and seeing these, like the sort of the obviousness of like the way that she would adorn and embellish herself with gems, kind of made sense with why I was using those in sort of two-dimensional works as well.

But yeah, this work was initially inspired because it's like the foot, this contrasting idea of sort of repulsion and desire. Like the foot as like a, you know, like a fetish object. the ways in which, like, I've been casting and moulding with silicon for a while now, but knowing the material yield of it, just how it could really amplify that idea of repulsion by being able to contort itself and create sort of impossible fleshy figurations. So, yeah, you've got that sort of tension between the realistic but also the impossible with it. And yet the delicate sort of like studding of the jewellery as well. It's a tender act. It's a tender act of like elevation and of preserving and archiving and archiving her material and the tastes of my mother through her belongings. But it's also through this like grotesque act of piercing as well. And the idea specifically in Thai culture that like the bottom of a foot is sort of offensive as well. Like if you showed it to anybody, it would cause like incredible offence. And that sort of tension is elaborated on in the way that the work is displayed here quite highly on the wall because it, um, is quite a taboo thing, really. Yeah, from that, from that cultural perspective, to have to, like, walk under a foot like that would be, yeah, and could it be offensive. We installed it high so people couldn't do it. Yes. Yeah. But Nathan did also make another sculpture specifically for this exhibition, which is in Gallery 6. It's called Phuang Malai. And of course, that features a very important piece of your mother's jewellery.

So it's her wedding ring, right? Yes. Yeah, her wedding band, which is sort of this teutonic object as far as all of the inherited items of hers was, just because symbolically it was this sort of, you know, it's representative of this union between her and my father. and, you know, she never took it off. So it was something that was always pressed against her flesh. And because of her tiny fingers, it was something that I wouldn't be able to wear myself. So the sort of wishful fulfillment of being able to see what it would look like for me to wear it comfortably is able to be serviced by like a silicon reproduction of my hand. But yeah, that even the twisted form of the Phuang Malai, Phuang Malai is sort of this really ubiquitous floral sort of embellishment in garland that are peppered all throughout Thailand. You can buy them in a traffic jam. People will walk by with a basket full of them and offer them through the car window. They're just an increasingly like noticeable decorative feature when you're in Thailand, you start clocking them everywhere. And they're readily available and again, perishable materials. And they're all made out of flower, flower heads, stems, buds. And with this work, I wanted to again use the potential of the arms folding and on themselves to create this sort of like wraparound effect, which is sort of, you know, it represents this kind of like union. And it also has this sort of sense of like creepiness or objection.

And it's part of a way of posing the sort of like the discomfort that I have with kind of like actually parting with such a sentimental and valuable object as well or situating it within the context where it has to sit outside of me. And it honours this kind of like material, deregistration, right, like getting, like getting rid of, and dematerializing. It's sort of like a clutter in your life. And it's sort of like the, that's called Buddhistness as a concept. And then from my own flesh or the reproduction of my own flesh, you have these like fields of orchids springing forth. And they're the national flower of Thailand. Again, like a very ubiquitous decorative feature in Thai, like, own businesses in the diaspora as well. They're markers of authenticity. you will see an orchid in a tire restaurant or a massage parlour use and the imagery that they promote through the licensed stock imagery and that sort of thing. But then also the orchid itself is like really potent symbolically. It has this like fascinating ability to be bred and hybridized to create all range of impossible sorts of patterns and shapes. You don't need to, if for orchids don't need to anchor down complex root systems in order to thrive, they can attach themselves and thrive in tropical climates because that's how they sort of like gather the moisture that they require to sort of like bloom and spring forth.

And so for me like this orchid becomes this very like potent metaphor for that sort of experience of trying to like anchor a culture within a diasporic context and how to sort of propagate that and let it flourish and bloom. So it's got this very sort of like, yeah, it's sort of like gentle themes running through it in service of the sort of metaphorical power of the ring, you know, as well. Yeah. Yeah, we really feel the weight of responsibility in your mum's ring. Yeah, yeah. So obviously your work is included in a broader exhibition in Bloom, which is about the interrelationship between people and flowers or how flowers can be used as signifiers of identity. Have you seen any surprising interrelationships between your work and other works in the exhibition? I mean, the being situated in like the mother room was something that sort of like slowly dawned upon me as I was walking around the space, which I very much appreciate it. I like the relationship between having a member of the British royal family situated alongside a selection of works that sort of processed Thai identity because the idea of the Thai monarchy is such a like essential, you know, quote unquote pillar of Thai identity as well. And my mother especially adored the pomp and ceremony around the British royal family because for her that was something that, you know, bound Australia and tie together. It's like, oh, you both like have fealty to a royal family, you know, you both, they're in the gossip rags and you see them constantly, they're on currency. So that for her was sort of like this connective tissue between the two cultures. And she adored specifically Princess Diana.

Oh, I mean, yeah. Yeah, because she was a glamorous young royal family member. She kept the memorial Princess Diana calendar up in the bathroom for eight years, I think. It definitely lasted until I was in high school. Yeah. So we might open up to questions in a second, but before we do, you've got a show coming up next year. You're part of the Adelaide Bayne or what? What are you making for that? I am making work that is extending my interest in hands as like an entry point or symbol for Thai culture and authenticity, Thai authenticity. So similar to the works, Heirloom and Phuang Malai, they're silicon casts of my own body. But in this instance, I'm stretching the forms out to sort of ridiculous proportions. So I think long forearms and. fingers and attaching bows to each other and really playing with this sort of like floppiness of them and trying to create this sort of uncanny, creepy, ghoulish forms of my arms and hands processing a lot of different, yeah, symbols and metaphors for Thai culture that are threaded throughout a range of media and collections and that sort of thing. And in terms of how those silicon sculptures are made, it's quite laborious, right? and it involves different collaborators?

Yes, yes. So with the two works in this exhibition, they were mostly painted by a collaborator, Kiana Jones, who does self-taught, like, prosthetic makeup artists. She did it to learn how to do Halloween gore makeup. And so I was doing studio one-on-one sessions with her and sort of learning through her. So I've gotten to the point where I can paint an airbrush myself, but there was a lot of anything. anxiety around the object that was to wear my mother's ring. So I was employing her to sort of do a better job of it than I could. She has a much lighter touch. I have a bit more of a heavy-handed spray when I use the airbrush to paint the work. Yeah. Yeah, I encourage you to take a closer look at the silicon sculptures because, yeah, the modelling of the skin is quite remarkable. Yeah. Do anyone have questions? Thank you. This has been really great. The works are all so intricate and have so many hours of labour associated with them. And you were just talking about working with a collaborator on the most recent sculpture. Have there been real moments of complete failure in trying to pull something together because of, you know, just going wrong or not working out as you wanted it to? And have, like, how have you coped with that? Do you revisit the same work? Do you adjust it? Because I just imagine there must be an element of frustration as well.

Yeah, especially sculpting with silicon, it's a very unforgiving material. If you make a mistake with it, it's very hard to cover it up. And, you know, funnily enough, it was that commission for Phuang Malai was the most recent work where there was elements of, yeah, things going wrong at various stages with my collaborator and myself. trying to get that across the finish line. But with that work, it was sort of important to sort of start again and be given the grace to start again with it, to have that sort of like guarantee that it has the intended aura and sort of impact because of the item it's on. But outside of that, generally, if I do have studio hiccups and mistakes, I try to think of ways of recycling or repurposing the silicon material, even if it's just cutting it up for the use of future moulds and that sort of stuff and just like retaining it for that type of purpose. I generally go with the flow, though. So, yeah. If I start an idea and I don't like it, I tend to not revisit it later on later on, yeah, unless I have a bathtub moment of, yeah. Thank you so much for an amazing talk. I did have a little question about these two larger works here. When you get up quite close and intimate, there's this amazing texture that's kind of almost very reminiscent of like a bubble wrap. And I was quite intrigued about that. And I was wondering if you'd be able to talk a little bit more about that intriguing texture on the beautiful photographs. Yeah, yeah. The photographs themselves are extremely small. So they are wallet-sized portraits that I've done. very high resolution scans of and slowly expanded to make them monumental. And part of that is blowing up the textures and having something which is normally so intimately scaled that you would carry it with you, but give it this elevated sense of like impact, this aura around it by blowing it up and making it sort of much larger than it's ever intended to be viewed at. Yeah. So it's like this really beautiful grained photo paper that's quite tough and resilient. But that's the text here that you're seeing blown up with it. So you've explored your mum's Thai identity, but also how do you grapple with her living in Australia? Because I know as a New Zealand living in Australia for 15 years and just actually going through the citizenship process, I'm still grappling with. I feel like I'm losing my New Zealandness, but I'm not very gaining Australianness. So you're in this really interesting vacuum that your mum would have lived in in terms of the two countries. So have you grappled with her Australianness a little bit and some of it other than some of the materials that she's left behind here and some of the traditions that she tried to maintain?

Yeah, I mean like even though she devoted half of her life yeah, in in Australia, she very much like adopted the language and like self-taught by watching prisoner. I'm pretty sure she was talking that. watching soap boxes to learn how to speak English properly. But outside of that, it's difficult. There was this sense of, it's like, I think this sense of as an immigrant of colour, like minimizing herself in certain spaces and sort of like, yeah, sort of retreating into herself or into her community or into her family as well because they were sort of like the safe networks and safe spaces for her. So I guess, yeah, that sort of affected how Australian she was perceived as being, if that makes sense, yeah.

Just quickly on behalf of the National Portrait Gallery and the audience here, I'd like to thank Nathan and Serena for their wonderful time today, but that's just our thanks. I'm sure you might have some last words you'd like to say. but I just wanted to jump in there and thank our lovely curator and guest artist today. Thanks. Thank you. It's great having you here.

Yeah, it's been great to work alongside everyone here and sort of have this work. Yeah, be so prominently displayed, sort of the most eyes I'll ever have on my work, probably.

No. More to come. Thank you.