Brighton-based artist Beth Gibbons takes a single work and asks how many forms it can inhabit simultaneously, existing as a silkscreen print, a 3D-printed object, a projection and a photographic print, challenging the fixed hierarchies that confine art to one context or one value.
The text arrived in her sleep: ONLY CREATIVITY WILL SAVE YOU. Beth Gibbons woke with it and made it into a work. Then she made it into several.
The phrase is now a silkscreen print on acrylic-painted MDF. A 3D-printed object in PLA, in pink and in white. A projected image. A fine art photographic print on custom surfaces. The same statement, the same moment of clarity in the dark, existing across completely different forms and contexts without any one of them being the definitive version.
“The silence became so loud, the light became so dark,” Gibbons writes. “Then a text appeared in my sleep: ONLY CREATIVITY WILL SAVE YOU.”
This fluidity is deliberate and central to her practice. “I am interested in how my artwork can exist in more than one form and across multiple end applications,” she says. A single work might live as a fine artwork on a gallery wall, become an art product in the home, or be photographed and reprinted onto a T-shirt. Each form is a different context, a different relationship between the work and the person encountering it, and Gibbons sees all of them as legitimate. The question she is asking is why art should be confined to a single role.
The practice spans colourful 3D works, photographic prints, projection art, installation and text-based work, all orbiting this interest in how making and experiencing art can become inseparable, and how the process of finding new forms for a single idea opens up new possibilities rather than diluting the original.
Beth Gibbons is an artist whose practice explores the context of artwork across multiple forms and applications.
Website: bethlucygibbons.com Instagram: @bethlucygibbons
Only Creativity Will Save You, 2023–2024. Silkscreen print on acrylic-painted MDF, 59 × 84cm; 3D print (PLA), 20 × 20 × 5cm; fine art photographic prints, custom size and surface; projection.
