Bec Skelton is an interdisciplinary artist, printmaker and storyteller.
about
Bec Skelton is a visual artist living and working in Minneapolis. Their work is rooted in drawing with a focus on creating visual and textual narratives through parallel practice in printmaking, ceramics, and digital media.
Bec’s drawings have been shown at the Quarter Gallery and the Hinkley Fire Museum and they have independently distributed zines and comics.
They will complete their BFA at the University of Minnesota with a Capstone exhibition in the Nash Gallery in Spring 2022.
featured work
mindset
The question that drives my artistic practice is ‘How do people read art?’ I develop characters and motifs, building up visual language and lore in parallel. Narratives evolve through the combustion of process and intuition. I draw inspiration from historical examples like medieval miniatures and woodcuts, mural paintings and relief sculpture. If a visual language is telling a story or instructing in some way then I want to explore how that language works. Is it in conversation with written or oral records? Have transcription errors birthed new canons? How do images mutate into symbols and how can my work push the boundaries of communication?
I always start with drawing, a limitless mode where I can work fluidly and intuitively, and continue through more specialized modes that force me to adapt and make choices. My first rule of practice is to work with the medium best suited to the project and I determine this through repetition and transposition. I cultivate continuity in my work by exporting characters and scenes into parallel media. My second rule is to create first and think later. This does not mean I don’t plan—my work often includes levels of staging, composition and revision—but the content comes to life through the act of creation. I don’t begin with a story or a message; it develops through the process.
I work with a kind of magical thinking that if my work is subconsciously guided it will be universally readable, like I can tap into the language of collective consciousness. I’m inspired by visual language informed by history and shaped by dreams and self reflection. I imagine that this symbology is indelibly human, a universal mythology etched in the brain and continuously reborn.