In conversation with Gabriele Beveridge
“Visibility matters—when more women’s work is seen in public spaces, it’s an opportunity to stop someone still.”
- Gabriele Beveridge
Artist Gabriele Beveridge with NEST (II) at Glassed in Dreams exhibition private view at 100 Bishopsgate, London. Image credit Isabel Infantes PA Media Assignments.
Gabriele Beveridge is known for her sculptural and conceptual practice that combines materials as diverse as hand-blown glass, photo chemicals, and found images. Her assemblages put display on display, spotlighting the modular shelves that populate the innards of high-street shops, often combining them with slumped hand-blown glass forms that harness the material’s beauty, strangeness, and ubiquity. They mimic the body and the way it’s displayed in a vastly expanding search space, where biology evolves with the natural and non-natural, the organic and inorganic.
Your installation Glassed in Dreams at 100 Bishopsgate is truly captivating. Can you describe how you approached this site-specific installation and how the architecture of the space influenced your creative process?
Thank you. I grew up in Hong Kong and lived among glass towers, and my memories are full of the life Hong Kong had to offer. Markets springing up between skyscrapers. The humidity. The way life squeezes itself into every gap and corner. With this installation, I was thinking about living among those rigid geometries and the influence of sunlight and reflections. I wanted the glass to act as both a window and a membrane, capturing light and reflections to give the impression of something both solid and dissolving.
NEST (II) by artist Gabriele Beveridge at Glassed in Dreams exhibition private view at 100 Bishopsgate, London. Image credit Isabel Infantes PA Media Assignments.
What is it about glass that draws you in so intensely, and how does this material help communicate the ideas you’re exploring in your sculptures?
I’ve worked with glass for around 15 years. I was initially interested in it because it flows; it’s a liquid at one point, and then physically, how this fluidity becomes frozen. It is simultaneously fragile and strong, ancient yet continuously evolving. I’m fascinated by how it embodies transformation, both in its making and in its ability to alter the perception of a space. Take Nest, which almost filled my studio at one point. It’s a cube of glass with eight transparent pink orbs, or organs I call them, at its core. As you walk around it, you can see the reflection of these glass orbs transposed into the empty space, which plays with the idea of who is observing whom. In fact, one night I came back to my studio, and the moon was shining through the skylights onto Nest, and it created gridlines and abacus-like shadows throughout the space, as if it was computing or broadcasting.
In a corporate space like 100 Bishopsgate, do you think public art can influence the atmosphere and daily interactions among employees and visitors?
I hope it can. I certainly take inspiration from the city and daily life, the psychological charge of the street. Public art can work if it interrupts the expected rhythms of daily work life. This installation Glassed in Dreams was conceived to offer a pause, a chance to see something shift in the glass as people move past it.
Incorporating poetry, particularly George Oppen’s Of Being Numerous, seems to be a key influence in your work for this project. How do you see the relationship between poetry and sculpture, and how does Oppen’s poem inform the sculptures displayed in Glassed in Dreams?
Poetry and sculpture both have a way of distilling experience. And maybe it’s a similar instinct to search blindly, grasping at meaning like water through fingers. There’s probably less room for experimentation with glass because you sort of need to know what you’re doing before you make it, but the more you work with it, the more you get to know its tension and rhythm, the colours it takes, and the happy accidents that can lead on to the next thing. I also think Oppen’s Of Being Numerous speaks to the tension between the organic and inorganic, which is an idea in my work. And there are moments in his poem where he sets up an image to stand in its own right: something that is so independent that it is “patient with the world.”
As a female artist involved in a project to boost the visibility of women sculptors, how does it feel to challenge the gender imbalance in public art spaces?
Large-scale sculpture and public art have been male-dominated fields, yes, and that imbalance is still very present today. Visibility matters—when more women’s work is seen in public spaces, it’s an opportunity to stop someone still.
What is next for you in terms of exploring new materials, themes, or spaces in your future projects?
I’m currently experimenting with materials that push the boundary between the natural and the engineered—working with metal mesh and light-responsive coatings. Site-wise, I’m drawn to working in outdoor environments where the natural elements—wind, water, changing light—become active participants in the work. I realised while walking through a solo show recently, that so much of my recent work arrests chaotic elements in nature and brings them into view. Whether it’s chemicals on anodised aluminium panels that look like they’re being influenced by electromagnetic waves or cosmic patterns on marble, I’m working with rough materials, but it’s also a bit like developing a photograph in a darkroom. I heard a nice line recently by the chemist Lee Cronin: “life is the universe developing a memory.” That makes sense to me.
BODIES (I,II) by artist Gabriele Beveridge at Glassed in Dreams exhibition private view at 100 Bishopsgate, London. Image credit Isabel Infantes PA Media Assignments.
The [Quick] #FLODown:
Best life advice?
Follow the beauty.
Last song you listened to?
Laurens Walking by Angelo Badalamenti.
Last book you read?
Breath of Life by Clarice Lispector.
Can't live without...?
Cigarettes.
What should the art world be more of and less of?
Less of a silo.
Glassed in Dreams, a free large-scale, female-led sculptural installation, by Gabriele Beveridge is on display at 100 Bishopsgate until February 2026. Created in collaboration with curatorVassiliki Tzanakou, the project was selected as the winning commission of the Of Being Numerous open call. Presented by Brookfield Properties and AWITA, this cultural initiative champions underrepresented female talent in a city where only 13% of sculptures are attributed to women.
A parallel exhibition, ‘Inside the Studio: How Artists Make Work’, at Brookfield Properties' 30 Fenchurch Street, showcases Beveridge's winning submission alongside notable proposals from three of the +40 artist-curator duo's entries of the 'Of Being Numerous' open call, offering insight into the creative process behind public sculpture commissions and placemaking.
Website: gabrielebeveridge.com
Instagram: @gabrielebeveridge
