Classics is a body of work consisting of a digitally printed frieze, a set of screen-prints and collection of bone china sculptures, developed in response to Edinburgh College of Art’s Victorian classical cast collection.

Year: 2001
Exhibitions: ‘synthetic’ The Proposition Gallery, Belfast, Northern Ireland (2001)/ The Globe Gallery, North Shields, England (2002); ‘Return’ University of Kansas, Kansas, USA (2001); ‘Cast Contemporaries’ Edinburgh College of Art, Edinburgh (2012)

Classics is a multi-component body of artworks inspired by the Edinburgh Cast Collection, at Edinburgh College of Art, which includes casts of sculptures such as Venus de Milo, the Winged Goddess of Samothrace, La Pieta and the Parthenon frieze.

Beverley was interested in how emerging digital conventions of proportions, standards and aesthetics would relate to this historically significant Victorian collection and so set about a process of digital recreation. Using off-the-shelf 3D characters from the figurative computer modelling software Poser, Beverley re-modelled the collection’s twenty one full figure sculptures as 3D digitally generated compositions. The resulting compositions were then rendered, digitally printed on archival paper, and combined as a set of panels, to create a digitally printed frieze.

These compositions were further developed and abstracted, by extruding the 3D character profiles to eradicate the representative, figurative nature of the works. The resulting forms were developed into a series of thirty six abstract screen-prints; and six hand-made bone china sculptures.

Funded by: John Florent Stone Fellowship in the School of Drawing & Painting, Edinburgh College of Art