Helen Beard Studio

There are no innuendos here. London-based visual artist Helen Beard uses vivid colours to portray explicit moments of sexual intercourse. This sensuality is most evident in her painting and needlepoint, but Beard’s ethos of intense colour pairings to evoke orgasmic synergies spreads across all of the mediums in which she works. Her paintings are electric precisely because they’re primary. They manage to reverse-engineer the concept of intimacy back to its first principle, that of opposites attracting to create compelling contrasts. At a first glance, it’s difficult to grasp what your eye is drawn to: is it the colour, or the content? Either way, these vibrant complexions come together in arousing harmony. 

L-R: From The Sweet Deep Throat Of The Night Flower, 2022. The Big Dipper, 2017. You Bring Me To My Knees, 2024.

With that contrast also comes agency, as is found in the distance between two different amplitudes of vibration, before they collide. By empowering the abstracted characters of her paintings, she engenders her viewers (especially women) to take ownership of their desires, not with a bashful glance but with eyes wide open, eager to drink in the beauty of the experience. Like most women in our constricted milieu, Beard has struggled with unabashedly voicing her desires, particularly in naming sex as an important need in her life. She takes inspiration from unapologetic artists who have paved the way for artists like her to raise their sword-brush against the persistent taboos of publicly consumed art. Again, there are no innuendos here, no twee clouds of faint hues to shroud her fantasies in ambiguity. Look no further than Take Good Care of Yourself (2019), which places a woman fingering herself at the center, her body a puzzle of primary colours, each part a unique pattern of vibrant shapes. The focus is blatantly on the subject’s pleasure, a gentle yet defiant proclamation of sexual exploration as a pillar in self-care. 

Take Good Care of Yourself, 2019.

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What two-dimensional paintings leave to the imagination, Beard’s sculptures excavate with tactile urgency. For her piece, I’m into you, Are you into me? (2009), she hand-crocheted colourful wool caps around the tips of small vibrators placed in phalanx formations. The dichotomy between the pliant and meticulously hand-crafted crochet work, and the vibrator’s unyielding machinery, is the sort of multimedia intercourse you can only get in sculpture. This pairing of materials digs a little deeper than meets the eye─as with her works on canvas, Beard’s gestures are a constant revelation that eroticism is made possible by contrast. Her colour gestures stand in sharp contrast to the aesthetic conservatism espoused by the increasingly ubiquitous “millennial gray,” the dull hues and constrained minimalism that contains so much of our popular architecture and interior design. In these beige and pale-pastel settings, all erotic expression is subverted into a corporate tranquility, this despite the sex-positive ethos to which we regularly pay lip service. 

I'm into you. Are you into me? 2009.

The bodies that Beard depicts do appear, for the most part, to replicate the same body type, leaving room to explore a more inclusive view of sex. It’s possible that Beard is simply creating from her own experiences, perhaps inserting herself in the work, but it would be exciting to see representations of a more diverse body habitus in her paintings, bringing more intersectionality to her feminist position. Ultimately, her style does far more good than harm inasmuch as an exorbitant use of colour─unironic, unabashed, and undiluted─is seldom celebrated in fashion, architecture, and art stratospheres. Beard resists this bashfulness by singing a full-throated gospel of colour. A gospel sung without innuendoes, and with a sincerity that brings the viewer in direct contact with their own sexuality, making way for open conversation (and personal reflection) sans taboo. This sincerity, too, is a necessary ingredient for eroticism.

L-R: Helen Beard Studio; Song Of Self, 2019.