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.