07/10/2026
Beth McAlester is a Northern Irish artist based in London. Working primarily in oil on wood, her paintings examine identity, place, and acts of commemoration through semi-biographical narratives informed by post-Troubles contexts in the UK and Ireland. Her work draws on personal experience and inherited histories, using material and image to consider how these are constructed and carried forward through individuals, objects, and places.
The works included in the exhibition examine the various ‘uniforms’, both cultural and political worn in Ireland. In ‘Sock Glue’ McAlester depicts a floor level image of a line of Irish dancers with their distinctive cross laced dance pumps. The work shows a girlish yearning for a clannish ritual that the artist was unable to engage with due to growing up in a small protestant town in Northern Ireland. In the other two works it is the Orange Order that are depicted, a fraternal protestant organisation in Northern Ireland. In ‘The Game’ the OO are shown marching from above, the atmosphere of the work is ambiguous - the bystanders potentially complicit or threatened. McAlester is less interested in resolving this tension than in thinking about the moment in which communal gatherings become oppressive tools of force. Similarly, ’Men For No Seasons’ is an interior scene taken from a video filmed inside an Orange Hall during the Twelfth, a gathering McAlester was encouraged to avoid long before she understood the implication of attending.
In all three works the focus is less upon those wearing the ‘uniform’ than upon those who exist in the same sphere and yet do not. In her own words “my work is a mode of questioning where I (and by extension the viewer) stand in relation to those left on the wayside of our contemporary Western imagination, but also tribalism in a more universal sense.”
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