Rebecca Beinart

Rebecca Beinart

Rebecca Beinart is a Nottingham based artist who studied Fine Art at Nottingham University for 3 years and has always experimented with large-scale projects such as her final degree show where she created a treasure hunt within a market place. The objects she made were fortune cookies, which people would break open and reveal clues, which would lead them around the market however, it was also educational, as people would learn about the city or the market place in the process. This showed her willingness to work with a variety of disciplines, which she is still doing to date. Beinart then went on to do an MA in Art + Ecology in Devon which she loved as the course was based on experimentation and was taught by writers, artists and scientists as well as using photography to document live events which she can archive.

Beinarts Bristol project was commissioned work where she spent time walking along the route of a concealed river leading to the sea. She completed this route 7 times with a different person each time where she learned different facts, stories and information about the river which inspired her photograph of sketching a small part of a landscape and holding it up, placing it in to the real life landscape.

London gave Beinart another project to focus on where she went foraging for food out of the wild (not bins) and used them to create a meal with a group of people in a workshop using her self sufficient kitchen in the little trailer attached to her bicycle.

The Loughborough project in 2010 portrayed the worlds financial system and in reaction to this, she made live yeast out of flour and water and then used some of it to make bread and passed the rest on and instructed everybody to do this so as the product could spread worldwide.

The next project she did, she worked with her sister for 4 years and was based on the theme of Origination. They looked in to their own family history and family tree to find out about their ancestors and from this created a video. The video was based on a dinner party however there were no guests and the food gets eaten. All of this was filmed in the salt lands of Africa as they found out that their great great grandad sold salt when the water on the salt plains dried out.

Beinart then went on to look at how nature, manly plants and leaves, can be used as a type of medicine. This project was named ‘Poison’ and she looked at plants that were known to be harmful to humans but were still used as medicine. After gathering information and the history of making medicines she made a liquid that would be dangerous to drink but the interest of how you could make something dangerous from something so pretty was her inspiration.

Finally, the most recent project was a Twinning project between wasteland and how these sites are used, as ‘it is a place for your imagination because everywhere else is set in stone.’ Photographs were used to identify places that are not used, on waste or desert land where an old building may have been. The main part of the project used volunteers in England and Bali on wasteland where a photograph was taken every 50 steps to document the areas.

David Severn

     David Severn is a 21 year old Nottingham based photographer who grew up in Mansfield. He dropped out of his A levels months in to pursue a career in photography as he was receiving commissions during his studies which was earning him money and therefore also didn't attend University. Severn has produced two major current projects, taken on a 6 x 7 Viewfinder camera that uses Kodak Portra 400 film.
     The first of the projects is called 'Thanks Maggie' which is a personal tribute to his father who worked in mines for his whole life and to his grandfather who was a mine deputy and the pictures tell a story of the re-invented ex-colliery sites in and around Mansfield where he grew up. It also aims to show the town in it's post-industrial recovery with everything from old and abandoned machinery to stories from old and retired miners. One photograph shows the story of his father now that the mines have closed and he took up a new profession of performing as an Elvis impersonator before retirement several months ago. Another image shows the old mining houses that are still inhabited but are down to be demolished although some residents are refusing to move out and continue with every day life. The most moving photograph is a portrait of an ex miner who, after finding out about Severn's project, stood up in the middle of a cafe and recited poetry about a miner before sitting down and telling him a story about A mine Rescue worker who was called in to the aid of 3 miners who were in a collapsed mine shaft and as he rescued the trapped miners, the deputy was crushed under the debris and suffered from broken ribs, collapsed lungs, a punctured spleen and was eventually taken to hospital after being resuscitated on site where later in hospital, he 'died' a further two times and was once again successfully resuscitated before the doctors found a brain haemorrhage. The chances of survival were very small and the ex-miner telling Severn about the story asked whether he would have wanted to die due to all of the injuries or whether he would have held on, and after he answered he told him that it was a good thing that he held on as he was sitting here today telling Severn the story.
     The second project was based around the Travelling Showman Community which documented the lives of the people behind the major travelling fayre in Nottingham. Severn got access to the trailers of the workers who spend their lives travelling and setting up the fayre to work on. He learned about how they live and the way that they choose to marry in to others in the same business. His series of photographs are still being decided before being entered in to an exhibition in Nottingham.