Artists
United Kingdom
Sacha Beeley
La Bee de Beeley
06.02.23 01.03.23
Sacha Beeley is an animator & visual artist from the UK. Her creative process is based on character observation, surreal imagery and an irreverent sense of humour. Inspired by the world of entomology, Sacha’s character-driven animations are often playful with dark or solitary undertones. Her graduate film, Big Toast, was met with industry-wide praise after screening at the BFI London Film Festival, 2019 and landed her commercial representation at Strange Beast, London. For the last few years Sacha has been working in the commercial industry, and continues to develop her artistic practice as an independent filmmaker. During her residency at Proyecto´ace, Sacha has been experimenting more with analogue animation, in which frames are hand-drawn, scanned, digitally colorized and then sequenced so as to build a narrative that is full of a subtle, dark sense of humor that makes the audience laugh while reflecting on life and some of its absurdity.
ARTIST STATEMENT
La Bee de Beeley is a short film that explores the harsh life of a Queen Bee within the hive. The language we have given to roles inside the beehive paints a rich picture of their community, with words such as ‘worker bees’, and the Queen’s ‘attendants’ who feed her ‘royal jelly’. However, in reality the life of a Queen Bee is not as luxurious as it seems. Constantly surrounded by her ‘attendants’, the Queen is fed and pampered around the clock, yet she is only able to leave the hive once in her lifetime. The survival of the entire hive relies on her. In this gilded cage, her life is spent dragging her heavy body around the hive to lay eggs. Using a Russian banya spa as a metaphor, this film invites you to think about mothers in all shapes and sizes and the invisible emotional labour they carry out. Do they have agency in this role?
BIO
Sacha Beeley
United Kingdom
Lives and works in London, UK
EDUCATION
2016 | BA French & Italian. The University of Bristol, Bristol, UK
2018 | MA Character Animation. Central Saint Martins, London, UK
EXHIBITIONS
2022 | Supernova Digital Animation Festival. Denver, USA (Honorable Mention)
2021 | Pixelatl Festival. Mexico
2019 | BFI London Film Festival. London, UK
2019 | BFI Future Film Festival (3 nominations)
2018 | Gojo Animation Gallery. Kyoto, Japan
AWARDS
2021 | Honorable Mention at Supernova Digital Animation Festival, Denver, USA
2018 | Best Animated Film. Dublin Independent Animation Festival, Dublin, Ireland
OTHERS
Toronto Animated Image Society art residency, Canada
Visiting Lecturer at Central Saint Martins, London, UK
Plymouth University, Kingston School of Art, London, Ontario College of Art and Design
Related Activities
´aceNITE
Stories
Artists in Dialogue
01.03.23
The second aceNITE of the year presented five women artists from different origins (Chile, Canada, Spain, the United States, Venezuela and England) intertwining cultures, identities and memories to tell stories, discover secrets and make visible forgotten circumstances through the projects carried out during their residences at ´ace, in the first slot of 2023.
The territory, its journey and personal experiences are present in the stories of Amy Stoker (USA) and Constanza Reyes (Chile). Stoker´s visual research constructs a narrative that reflects the struggle of generational unknowing and loss. With the help of a genealogist, the artist acquired records including censuses, land deeds, vintage and modern maps, and photographs to depict the family history that went missing over the years, seeking to build a narrative that reflects ignorance and generational loss. By other hand, Reyes uses as a starting point a kind of found object: a book bougth during her tours around Buenos Aires that narrates and describes the conquest of Peru. With the intention of appropriating the book, the artist adapts the story with the history of the conquest of Chile, and with contemporary Chilean conflicts, according to her own experience, making a printed intervention on it.
Ariana Pirela Sánchez (Venezuela-Spain-Canada), Elizabeth Castaldo (United States) and Sacha Beeley (England) highlight stories related to the female universe. Beeley, present a short film that explores the harsh life of a Queen Bee within the hive. The film metaphors with women invites you to think about mothers in all shapes and sizes and the invisible emotional labour they carry out. Elizabeth Castaldo addresses the idea of the divine in the feminine as a creative power and a force of connection with nature through an installation in the Diálogo space, which presents an installation overflowed of shapes and colors. Finally, Ariana Pirela Sánchez (with a melted culture that comes from her Venezuelan and Spanish origins mixed by years of residence in Canada) uses a legend of the Wayúu culture (as a metaphor to narrate the female transmission of teachings) to weave and unweave the threads of memory. She re-weaved the forgotten stories through a poetic installation made with raw wool, which she built and in where she developed her performance.
We also celebrated Marcela Caballeros´s installation finissage -after three months on display- in the Espacio Transversal.
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