Artwork

Beverley Duckworth is a London-based installation artist whose practice contends with our increasingly complex, intertwined relationship with waste and the natural world. Working with both organic and synthetic materials – including discarded clothes and plants – Beverley creates durational pieces animated by seedlings which gradually transform her installations over time. “Using overlooked materials such as waste, dust, and seeds, I make ‘living’ works that require ongoing care, tending, and repair.” Informed by her experience as a grower and by her background as an activist and campaigner for social and environmental justice, Duckworth’s practice explores the poetic, “subversive power of the seed.”

Beverley holds a BA in Painting from the Open College of the Arts, and in 2024 she completed an MFA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths University of London with distinction.  Her ‘living’ installations have been exhibited both nationally and internationally and she has also been the recipient of numerous prizes, including being a selected artist for UK New Artists 2022, for New Contemporaries 2024 and being a winner of the 2025 Gilbert Bayes Award for emerging sculpture.

Initially exploring the corporeal through organic materials such as skin and dust, Beverley’s practice gradually became more aligned with the environmental justice issues she had previously campaigned for. With the embedded meaning of materials central to Beverley’s practice, in her installations she recycles discarded items with an awareness of their origins, production, and eventual fate. Approaching waste “as a relation rather than an object,” Beverley considers not only its physical impact on the planet but also how it affects the environment and marginalised communities in sprawling and often disproportionate ways. “Waste intersects with questions of inequality and power relations. We export and discard waste to countries that we ‘other’, and what becomes ‘out of sight, out of mind’ for some, leaves a toxic trail for those on the receiving end.”

Referencing fast fashion dumps, such as the Atacama Desert landfill in Chile, which is visible from space due to its staggering size, Beverley’s graduate piece Surplus explores both the power of nature and the ramifications of excessive consumption on humans and the land. Composed of over a million seedlings breaking through heaps of discarded clothes which are used as “stand-ins for the body”, the piece also speaks to “our intimate relationship with nature”. Beverley likes to think of the seed as  a 'symbol of activism', where a coming together can precipitate change.  “As the growth takes over, these discarded clothes that were disparate and numerous, become collectivised through the power of the seed.”

Inspired by aerial views of landscape, Beverley’s piece Hide is a delicately constructed installation of used stockings suspended on fine thread and interrupted by “living pockets of green”. The piece calls attention to the alarming reality of how “synthetic materials, like nylon, become part of the strata of the soil, forming a new physical layer on the land.”

Most recently, Beverley has begun experimenting with new ways of documenting her work. “I started thinking about my practice seasonally, echoing the cycles of the plants I work with. I’ve begun archiving parts of the living installations by preserving them in a large, improvised flower press.” Beverley’s ‘living’ installation Residue is on show at the ICA as part of the New Contemporaries, running until 23 March.

All images are copyright of the artist unless otherwise stated.