Ashley Beerdat
Becoming the Poem

Becoming the Poem is an installation of landscape paintings that consider my relationship to nature and how to foster hope living in an ecological crisis. As a first-generation diasporic artist of Guyanese descent, I engage with speculative imagination, by exploring the flora and fauna of the region that my parents are from in West Coast Demerara near the Amazon rainforest, along with my present geographic location. Through material driven processes, I embed myself in highly intuitive, sensory-based working methodologies that mimic the evolutionary path of nature. The outcome, an accumulation of deep time materialized through my body and the paint, collapses past and future representations of natural formations, presenting nature’s resilience and how it can rise above ecological disaster.