Thicket (After Sommonte)
2025
Flashe on Linen, hand-built artist’s frame with mother-of-pearl inlay
33x38.5x4.5cm
This piece is inspired by works from the collection of Henry Wellcome. Dated in the 1800s by an unknown artist signed Sommonte, the paintings were images of fruit or flowers, with more clandestine pictures hidden on a concealed lower panel. My version can be activated by pulling a green upholstery cord.
Swipe for crit install pic featuring work by @noemiconan and @jenniferlouisemartin
My exhibition The Zodiac is open to the public for another 4 days, until this Sunday 31st October.
⭐️ @mao_gallery ⭐️
📸: Phil Brooks
I will be speaking at a webinar ‘Starting Out as an Artist in 2021’ with the other platform artists at MAO and chaired by Kate Mahony tomorrow night (28th October) from 6:30pm. The event is free to join online and you can register on the gallery website: .uk/event/platform-award-2021-talk
Thank you so so much to everyone who has made the effort to come out and see it so far 💫
Introducing first year MFA painter @beth.simcock
Beth Simcock is an artist working primarily in figurative painting, where she borrows the grammar of Pastoral tradition to render subjects from memory, archive, and the dancefloors of gay bars.
In her creative process, fiction and painting are closely entwined; each reshaping observation, research, and memory into new forms and follies. Her experience of ocular migraines with aura provides a phenomenological reference for the prismatic colour and numinous haze that characterise her visual language.
Thematically, Beth’s work engages an un-worlding project that explores alternative masculinities, often quoting metaphors of the cowboy parallel to her own young adulthood spent working with horses. She searches to locate queer micro-utopia in moments of fleeting togetherness: a glittering weekend in a long summer.
Beth is a graduate of the Ruskin School of Art, Oxford University. Her debut solo exhibition, The Zodiac, was presented at Modern Art Oxford as part of the CVAN South East Platform Graduate Award in 2021.
Beth has held residencies in the UK and Japan, and her paintings are held in esteemed private collections internationally.
1: Portrait of the artist in her studio @sladeschool
2: Detail from the artist’s studio
3: Installation, 2025
4: Boot
2026
Coloured silver leaf drawing in poplar artist’s frame
5: Thicket
2025
Flashe on linen in custom wooden artist’s frame with mother of pearl inlay.
6: Installation, 2026
Knifepoint
2025
Acrylic, Flashe, and spray paint on canvas
51 x 40.5cm
Can’t a girl just be nude, wielding a butter knife in the dark wood? And what if the beam of your headlamp catches something quickening in the fog; what then?
Install shots from my first crit @sladegradpainting
Small diptych with gilded edges.
The text (which wraps around the sides of the canvas) is from my account of watching a sick pony die over several afternoons while I was sweeping stalls at a holiday camp. The haulage guys wouldn’t come out on the weekend, so they moved her out near the feed barn under a tarp, which is where I later found the farm owner’s Malinois playing tug with a long yarn of straw-coloured hair. The pony and dog were both, in their own ways, adored (stoic men and little girls being the two most ardent archetypal animal lovers, respectively), and when I thought about them while making these paintings, I was also thinking about desire, and about death that has nothing to do with me.
