Nathan Beard (born 1987) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Boorloo/Perth who draws from his Australian-Thai heritage to unpack the slippery influences of culture, memory and authenticity in his work. Beard adapts intimate exchanges with family and archives alongside broader cultural signifiers of ‘Thainess’ to generate visually extravagant and idiosyncratic slippages of identity across mediums including sculpture and photography. By asking what it means to inherit a nuanced relationship to a culture which you are also inherently distanced from through a range of biographical and geographic circumstances, Beard’s work offers a unique and personal articulation of the complexities surrounding diasporic identity.

Beard holds a Bachelor of Arts (Art) with First Class Honours from Curtin University. Exhibitions include White Gilt 2.0, Firstdraft, NSW (2020), HERE&NOW20: Perfectly Queer, Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, WA (2020), White Gilt, Cool Change Contemporary, WA (2019), A dense intimacy (with Lindy Lee), Bus Projects, VIC (2019), Siamese Smize, Turner Galleries, WA (2018) WA Focus: Nathan Beard, Art Gallery of Western Australia, WA (2017) and Radical Ecologies, Perth Institute of Contemporary Art, WA (2016). His collaboration with artists Abdul Abdullah and Casey Ayres, The Greater Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, was presented at the NGV Studio for the 2012 Next Wave Festival the space between us wants to sing.

In 2022 Beard will be undertaking the Australia Council residency at ACME Studios, London. He was a finalist in the Ramsay Art Prize in 2021, and the Churchie National Emerging Art Prize in 2020. In 2017 Beard was selected for the 4A Beijing Studio Program, shortlisted as a finalist for the John Stringer Prize, and Highly Commended as a finalist in the Fremantle Art Centre Print Award. He is the guest editor of Runway Journal 43: Divine, and curated the Runway Journal presentation at Carriageworks for No Show (2021), which formed the first part of this issue.