About Tanya Beaven

Having spent all my life living in the rural landscapes of Wiltshire and Gloucestershire it is only natural that my greatest interests in life are history, archaeology and the natural world and it is these themes that most influence my work.

While some of my works are simple love letters to the inherent beauty of nature, others try to contrast this beauty with the geometric industrial aesthetics of the man-made world. I currently live in Stroud with its rich heritage of textile mills and one of my great loves is to go exploring in the rivers and streams that used to power these mills, looking for remnants of past lives such as shards of Victorian pottery or old mill-workers’ shoes. I then incorporate these finds into new works, bringing new purpose to them.

I have always been fascinated by the nature of the universe and the evolution of life on Earth. The idea that all carbon, the element that life depends on, was created in the heart of dying stars is both exciting and humbling. Life itself is transient; it blossoms and grows and then ultimately it weakens and dies away and is returned to the universe to be remade in some other form. The cyclical nature of existence, of death and rebirth, plays an important role in informing my work as does archaeology and the story of our collective history.