Behold

Behold was a mixed media abstract visual art exhibition held from 22 July to 29 July 2021, presenting a body of work developed during the global COVID-19 pandemic as an investigation into dimensional space and colour as metaphors for evolving socio-political perspectives on ability, knowledge, and information.

The exhibition articulated Rachel Eleanor Brook’s practice as a neuroqueer textile and fibre disruptor who re-visions autism, gender non-binarity, and disability through abstract and surreal assemblage. The works invited an engagement with materiality and metaphor in which fibre, form, surface, and structure became conduits for experience, otherness, and transformation.

This presentation marked the first solo exhibition at B & D Studios since March 2020 in response to UK COVID-19 restrictions and was among the final solo shows in both B & D Studios and Commercial Union House prior to the building’s closure under Newcastle City Council’s redevelopment framework.

The title “Behold” derived from the principal exhibition image “Behold the Tesseract”. The tesseract (or hyper cube) was invoked as a four-dimensional form perceptible from multiple vantage points. Each act of viewing revealed something new, as interconnected cubes formed a composite whole and the central point of focus appeared to shift with each encounter. In this way, the form operated as both structural and metaphorical device, offering formal complexity while opening pathways for visual experimentation.

The shape, when explored artistically, presented challenges of construction and simultaneously invited new modes of visual inquiry. Brook began to engage philosophically with the tesseract during the first UK lockdown, reflecting on what it signified in relation to their understanding of the world and the many lives interlinked by shared ground yet fragmented by individual experience. In the turbulence of the pandemic, the tesseract provided a visual structure and boundary in form while also representing a multiplicity of thought and perspective: one might hold two or more opposing notions concurrently and value (or reject) them equally. Brook’s work embodies a conviction that we inhabit a pivotal historical moment in which polarised socio-political consciousness is becoming increasingly diffuse and spherical.

In their moving-image practice, Brook presents dream-like sequences that merge surrealism and art-documentary form. Living with an invisible disability, they embed this lived condition into the material logic of their work, exploring how the unseen may exert presence, how assemblage may reconfigure narrative, and how fibre, fabric, and texture may function as carriers of identity, transformation, and otherness.