Bethan Hurford

Bethan Hurford is an artist currently studying in Sheffield. She works with painting, textiles, film and audio to create discourses around mental health. Hurford’s current practice uses the cinematic setting to represent the radio as a symbol for the brain. It explores the relationship between the personal complexities of mental health through ideas of tuning in and out of sounds and images that are disturbing, beautiful, disembodied, but ultimately optimistic. The audience is invited into the cinematic space where they experience Hurford’s perception of the brain in an immersive environment. Her films reveal the invisible, bringing the concealed effects of anxiety to the forefront of our attention. Through thoughtful pairing of sound and image, the work flirts with contradictions of beauty and anxiety, freedom and isolation, hope and despair and how these are inseparable from each other. She experiments with slow motion and duration to lengthen shots to allow the images to take on a more painterly quality, adhering to her background in painting. This background influences her bold and thoughtful use of colour which is persistent in her work to portray her themes and ideas. Hurford has exhibited work in online exhibitions at Bloc Projects (2021) and in an online group exhibition titled Living In Crisis (2021). She has also recently exhibited work at Sheffield Hallam University as part of the Inter exhibition where she screened a film at the void (2022).