Beth Waite’s practice is rooted in her experience as a woman, linked to a larger shared experience of the feminine, its histories and its mysticism. Her work facilitates a connection between the physical and spiritual through feminist structures, ritual and performance. These ideas are materialised through film, sculpture, performance and photography. Sculpture can act as props or costumes, participants as performers and performance as video, and are all of equal value.
Waite explores the feminine away from, or in contention with, patriarchal violence and the male gaze. Fantastical narratives act as a vehicle to create a separate and fictional space, to wield the feminine energy that makes us ‘other’. The nature of her practice always begins with her own experience as a woman, whilst drawing on spiritual and mystical sources, locating the work not in one context, but giving space for alive connections to take place. ‘The Return of the Repressed’ explores a ritual reconnection with the lost feminine soul, or ‘wild woman’.
“Narratives within my practice may be utopian, historical, fictional or other worldly; my work does not exist in complete reality nor fantasy, but the in- between: the home of the feminine soul.”