Interviews with Artists
Luke Beech
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Interview by Lauren Wilson
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Published in April 2026
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Installation view of Trial Proof (2025) alongside Luke Beech, Hammer Anvil Stirrup, Henry Moore Institute Sculpture Library. Image by James Clarkson.
Luke! We’re in your studio, hands wrapped around mugs of steaming tea - i’m so pleased to be here. Around us are materials, shelves of books, bubble-wrapped objects and artworks. As a way of opening the conversation, is there something in this space that goes some way to encapsulate your practice?
I don’t see myself or my practice as entirely separate anymore. To choose an object, that would be the cast truffle pieces I am working on at the moment. And, you know, I'm going to get deep here. I think actual truffles, they're really sort of ugly, smelly, horrible, underground, dark little objects. And they're weird. They're very outsider. But at the same time, they're valuable, they're precious, they’re something that can be foraged. They can be found out there. People want them. They've got this totally absurd value attached to them which - you know - feels quite true of being an artist. It’s an absurd place to occupy. I’m a means of production, I’m creating things, I’m making things. Art is valued, it’s precious, but it's also… absurd. So yeah, it’s easier to say I’m a truffle. That really is what it’s like when you’re an artist.
Image of the Studio of Luke Beech. Image by Lauren Wilson.
And when you look close it's got all these weird nobbles and bumps and bits of detail. It feels nice to hold, you turn it around in your hand and it feels different and organic. Then there’s the colour of it as well. It’s the colour of pool-chalk, but I like that it’s not a natural colour. You don’t get that kind of blue often in fruit, veg, flowers. It sets it apart. It makes it sort of alien too.
I guess the truffle just opens the door to it all - the way I look at myself, the way I make things, and how these odd little materials end up becoming stand-ins for feelings or states I can’t quite articulate otherwise.
And, you know, it’s referencing the work from my exhibition Winner Breaks First. There’s the queer foraging group work, but also the piece with the pool-chalk cast fingertips in the bowl of nuts, Foul Kiss, which felt early - like it could have gone further - but I was excited by it. And this is where that energy has led.
We’ve worked together a fair few times now - I’ve grown to observe a self-referential thread running through your practice, with new work often gesturing back to earlier pieces, like those truffles. There’s a breadcrumb trail for those who choose to follow it - ?
I suppose because early on I said a lot of my work is about creating a language around my experiences of psychosis and mental health. And if you’re building a language, that means revisiting, reusing, reiterating. So when I find materials or motifs or colours that work, I revisit them. And now, especially with the editions I’m making, they give me something to work towards too. It’s a way of pulling the nectar - or residue - out of past practice and letting it inform where I’m at now, letting it shift and morph.
I like when people can look at my work and see those links. I like artists whose work I can look at and think, “Oh, that fastening on the wall is from something they were messing with three or four years ago.” That excites me because that’s how I work. Sometimes you don’t know where something fits until much later.
So yeah, when something pops up again - a colour, a soundbite, a weird little object - it’s usually because it’s still talking to me. I just didn’t know the conversation wasn’t finished.
Installation view of Trial Proof (2025), Hammer Anvil Stirrup, Henry Moore Institute Sculpture Library. Image by James Clarkson.
I recently met your work at the Sculpture Research Library at Henry Moore Institute, as part of a presentation by artists supported through Yorkshire Sculpture International’s Sculpture Network. Can you talk about the works you presented?
I had this bright green hay net - very Billie Eilish green, borderline Brat green - filled with discarded seconds and rejected editions I’d been working through during the programme. I wanted to take this tool of nourishment, the net, and let that be the form. Something soft I could fill. Then I wanted to put all the labour from the studio - all the things I’d been doing during the programme - on display. They were the things I’d been messing about with, scrunched up and shoved in there.
And there’s something vulnerable in that, because a lot of them were the mistakes. The wrong things. The prints that got damaged in the studio or arrived damaged in the post. Things that didn’t work. All those frustrations crumpled together. And because we were responding to Phillida Barlow’s installation, Objects for a Library, it touched that soft versus hard dichotomy she had - but filtered through what I’ve actually been working on.
What I wanted to pick up from her wasn’t the look of her work, but that tension - tender things pressing against harder frameworks that contain them.
It also fed back into some of what’s in the net. Those big photographic hands came from my performance To Dust, which was about working clay methodically until it turned to dust. The Sisyphean act. Now those editions and prints feel like the Sisyphean act, and the net became the boulder. And the fish I’ve been working on recently - putting them in a net changes how you look at it again.
I’d hung it at threshold height so it interrupted people’s movement. It was about where you are and aren’t allowed. It tied back to ideas around the library: the methods of selection, the care, the power of archiving - all those processes in what is a totally fascinating and specific place.
So the net ended up being this sort of catch-all - literally - for everything I’d been doing, struggling with, messing up. A soft archive of the stuff that usually never gets seen.
There feels to me an element of mischief in situating crumpled-up papers in a library - a setting fundamentally about preserving these things. How does that sit with you?
I think there's always humour and mischief in my work. Not that I’m always taking the piss, but there is mischief. And I use the term absurdity a lot because absurdity is what comes after existentialism. It’s the only answer to it. And going back to my experiences of psychosis and being completely suicidal, I hit that existentialist phase. Coming out the other side, you end up with a little touch of absurdism, because in the end, that’s how I’m going to deal with things. It’s the only way.
Things are going on in the world - not just geopolitically, but socially, between family and neighbours, within relationships - and everything is just so much. Absurdity is a way of coping.
And maybe that’s where the mischief sneaks in - not to belittle anything, but just to stop it all swallowing me whole.
Detail of Red Herring (2025), Hammer Anvil Stirrup, Henry Moore Institute Sculpture Library. Image by James Clarkson.
You mentioned you also contributed a set of editioned prints to the display. Can we touch more on those?
Yeah. So, the fish prints… They came out of the same line of inquiry: wanting to develop editions that compensate for a gap I’ve felt in my practice. I’ve done performances, I’ve sculpted, I’ve made things - and been very good at then destroying them or losing them or purging them. I’ll hold my hands up: I’ve been bad at documenting my work. I’ve relied on other people’s photos, or my phone, and then things get lost.
Moving frequently between rented places, without access to long-term storage, has meant I’ve had to let go of some physical works that I would otherwise have kept. So the prints came out of a sense of grief for that lost work. But also as an opportunity to re-engage with places where I’ve already done the thinking. Now I can build new things from existing points, existing ground already covered.
And like you said about referencing my old work - the fish prints link back to Bator, the video-performance piece at Humber Street where I was licking lube off a fishing hook. I was thinking a lot about hook-up culture, dating and men, as I do. As I did. All the fish in the sea. And since then - well - I got quite the catch. I’m more settled now.
Video still from Bator (2022), Inter_Change Showcase, Humber Street Gallery. Image courtesy of the artist.
I wanted to make something that started from that place. I’ve been working with these vintage and found magazine images of men posing with trophy catches - the sort you still see in dating profiles and magazines and on social media. They’re everywhere. I’m fascinated by fishing because I’ve never wanted to do it, but the people who do talk about it so lovingly. They sell it to you like it’s the most amazing thing in the world. And it feels very male-dominated.
Teaching in prison, I hear men talk quite romantically about fishing - the freedom, the peace. And yet it’s still hunting. A trophy sport. I’m not taking the piss out of it. I’m smiling at it, I think.
So I isolated just the hands holding the fish in each magazine page I worked with, making this graphic score of hands and fishes floating. You can see I started with white emulsion, then black, graphite and then biro - which is the one I chose to take forward into the final print. And someone explained to me that in that image it’s actually a brown trout, not a red herring. I know. Red herrings don’t exist. That’s the whole point of a red herring, isn’t it?
And yeah, I’ve foiled it in red. Yes, it’s a brown trout. But that’s part of it. The flashy fish is the red herring. It’s a play. It’s a way in. It’s how people can start thinking about it.
So all that got mixed in - the romance, the danger, the bragging rights. The fish just became this really handy stand-in for all the ways men talk about longing without ever actually saying they’re longing.
I’m intrigued by the recurring focus on outdoor pursuits and sport throughout your work. You mention fishing, foraging, pool, and opposite me sit a collection of black and white photographs of wrestlers. What’s your interest in these themes?
A mate described me as being a bit “sport adjacent” in my current work - which feels right. Like sitting in a pub watching darts, but never joining in. I was the little lad walking up and down the sides of the football pitch picking daisies for my mum, whilst my brother actually played the sport. That’s my relationship to a lot of sports. As a man - and specifically as a gay, cis-presenting man - I’m around masculinity a lot. Well, I know everyone is, but I feel like I have both an outsider and an insider view. People tell me things I know they wouldn’t say to others. They test things, for better and worse. Sometimes because I pass as one of them, sometimes because I’m not one of them.
Socially I always feel like I’m on the edge of things. Christ, I'm talking about the edge of the football pitch again aren’t I?
And the wrestling stuff I’m looking at now - it’s early, but the more I look, the more I realise I’m referencing the same things: queerness, masculinity, ambivalence. That feeling of being both abhorred by and deeply attracted to hypermasculinity. Acknowledging how messy that is. But that’s where I’m at. And the artwork is where I work through it.
And I think that’s why wrestling’s creeping in - it’s basically masculinity in drag. It’s all theatre, all bodies, all coded gestures. It lets me look at the stuff I’m drawn to and horrified by at the same time.
Through the Yorkshire Sculpture International Network you’ve been on a learning journey in community with other artists. You’re also an educator, teaching art in prison. From these two experiences, can you talk about the benefits of learning together?
Motivation is probably the easiest answer. Inspiration too. We inspire each other, we motivate each other. You’re not one person tackling a mountain - you’re lots of people with your own networks, your own learning, and you share it. You aggregate the knowledge. It becomes a more social way of working.
Things feed into each other. You pick up fixations from each other. It develops its own language, its own resonance.
As a teacher, I get that from the people in my class. It’s not a one-way experience. I am so inspired by them - even if none of them would believe I said that. And co-teaching of course with my colleague, I get loads from her too. Loads of advice, shared enthusiasm, references and critique. I hope she feels the same about me.
I’m pro- “doing stuff together”. The isolated artist is a myth. And a nightmare. My studio’s on its own, sure, but the reason it’s working so well right now is because of things like this conversation - people coming through, studio visits - all of that ignites it.
So even though the studio’s technically just me in a room, it’s never really just me. The work always has other people’s fingerprints on it, one way or another.
As a closing thought, what are you working on at the moment and where is the work heading next?
Since Hammer, Anvil, Stirrup, I’ve toured the work to Tate Library in Brixton as part of Under Our Skin for LGBTQ+ History month, which felt like a really fitting context for it to live in. At the moment, I’m finishing a set of black oak veneer snooker cue boxes to house the upcoming truffle pool chalk editions - they’re a nod back to my Humber Street Gallery solo show, Winner Breaks First. Alongside that, I’m in the early stages of developing some new sculptural work, extending the fishing thread from Bator and Red Herring, with a view to showing later this year in Middlesborough. Otherwise, I'm in the studio keeping things going, spending time with professional wrestling iconography and a few slightly obsessive experiments with chewing gum.
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︎ @lukebeechartist
lukebeechartist.com
︎ @lauren_emily_wilson
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If you like this why not read our interview with Joey El Haddad.
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