I Came Looking For Birds & I Found Them

Elizabeth Beaumont is an Australian artist based in the Southern Highlands of New South Wales. Her paintings draw on environments across the country, from Wallum heathland to the Central Desert and southwest Tasmania, exploring the possibilities of abstraction as a way of registering the Australian landscape.

In I Came Looking for Birds and I Found Them, Beaumont turns her attention to the birds that sing and make their homes in the remnant bushland of Ngambri/Ngunnawal Country. She approaches her subjects through patient observation, a process that requires her to go unnoticed, lest the birds take flight. The delicacy of this encounter finds expression in the kinetic blur of birds lifting off across her canvases, as though caught at the very moment they become aware of the painter.

“In making these works, I could not cajole the birds to the surface,” Beaumont reflects. “Initial marks spoke nothing of the birds, but with time they seemed to suddenly arrive unannounced. Often when I tried to move them through paint into something more recognisable, they would disappear, as if spooked.”

The challenge of knowing when to leave their subtle forms untouched, or coax them out of abstraction, is, as Beaumont writes, “as thrilling as it is terrifying.” The layered surfaces of these paintings hold the traces of that negotiation, including what the artist describes as her “failures”: the spaces where birds once were. Ultimately, they also record those brief moments when the birds are comfortable in her presence.

Beaumont was selected by curator Amber Creswell Bell for ACB Selects in 2022. This led to her first solo exhibition, Everlasting, at Michael Reid Southern Highlands that same year. She was previously a finalist and Highly Commended recipient in the 2018 Glover Prize, and a finalist in the Royal Queensland Art Society Young Artists Award (2018) and the Kangaroo Valley Art Prize (2020).