MA Fine Art Final Degree Show

Bethany is a contemporary artist living and working in Marlborough, Wiltshire. Bethany graduated from the Royal College of Art, Camberwell College of Art, Newcastle University and most recently Central Saint Martin’s in London where Bethany is now exhibiting her final degree show for her MA in Fine Art, for which she has been awarded a Distinction. From 1,300 graduating students, Bethany along with 50 other students, has been nominated for the MullenLowe NOVA Award 2025 for Fresh Creative Talent

Bethany’s exhibiting project is titled Drawing Kin and centres around an expanded field of drawing.

Drawing Kin | Project Statement

I have spent the past two years questioning the ethics of drawing the landscape, developing work that embodies a sense of gentler, mutuality and participation with place. Drawing Kin collaborates with the compost heap in my garden, as a way to engage with place in a time of ecological chaos. I see my compost heap as a portal into underground thinking where networks of mycelium, tunnel diggers and other mini-beasts dominate an ‘other’ realm, which has inspired this body of work.

The work centres around an expanded field of drawing, paper making and casting, where paper is made from derivatives of the compost heap in my garden to make paper and compost humus ink. Cast paper forms are created from discarded kitchen scraps from the kitchen compost bin and then are cast using beeswax and paper pulp made from compost and recycled paper. The paper cabbage leaves are memento mori, memorialising beautiful, natural forms usually considered unworthy of grieving. The large scale drawings are collaborations with my garden and compost, observing the interconnectivity of the natural cycles in this space where I live. The pieces draw on a quiet form of kinship between self and other through the wisdom of cellulose.

The circularity of materials models compassion for natural rhythms and sustainability, supporting and generating future work: the beeswax is melted back down, the paper casts are returned to the compost heap. The process considers personal and collective grief, drawing as an act of radical kindness, generous attention-giving in the phenomenon of the empathetic drawing encounter. Casting as a ritual of compassion, a deep bow, the embodiment of grief for dead lavender, hives, mycelium, critters, nests and cabbage leaves, making kin in the process, becoming the paper and the paper becoming myself, all returned to the compost in the end. My work is about memorialising spent being, where we live and die as individuals but in death we return our borrowed molecules and residuum to the Earth’s compost where life continues its unabated cycles, linked in unimaginable loops and tangles, made and found, belonging and forgotten.