Mina Beckman

About

Mina Beckman // Formina

Project Title: Corner Portals

Mina Beckman is a multi-disciplinary maker, jeweler, poet, space organizer, and energy worker. For her final project of her Jewellery and Metals Masters Degree at RCA, titled Corner Portals, she developed a collection of cast bronze and electroformed metal pieces that transmute overlooked spaces, encouraging motion in stagnation with attention and awareness.

The Corner Portals are an ongoing series of experimental pieces that tuck into corners—of stairs, ceiling, and wall—with quiet voices. The series shown included a collection made of electroformed copper, a family of patinated cast bronzes, and a larger stone and concrete sculpture. Corner Portal: shifting the light is an electroformed piece that alchemized copper around cubic zirconia in an (in)organic, grown structure. Corner Portal: my voice is slow and soft is a hand-constructed crystalline structure in patinated cast bronze. Corner Portal: I wait, I hold down, I gather the pieces that no one wants is a sculpture co-created with found stone and concrete.

This project merges Mina’s interests, building on her decade as designer and owner of the Formina jewelry line, as well as her time as a professional intuitive/energy worker, to activate and communicate beyond the surface of usual human perception.

Drawing inspiration from the act of pilgrimaging to sacred sites like Stonehenge, Avebury, the Tuvixeddu Necropolis, and the Well of Santa Christina, she joins spiritual, metaphysical, and physical worlds. The action of pilgrimaging is a slow one, necessitating being present, leading to noticing details that are often passed by in the daily rush. The Corner Portals transform this concept by bringing the sacred into everyday life, by activating places that are buried, forgotten or purposefully ignored.

Corners are hardworking spaces, they create the interior and exterior of structures we exist within. This project is offering a way to activate, pay homage, and support the energetic structure of these spaces and therefore ourselves.

By noticing and giving voice to corners, the project seeks to raise questions of mutual support with extra-human consciousness and quantumly entangled materials. Following philosopher Timothy Morton’s concept of enmeshment and Donna Haraway’s idea of “becoming-with”, these corner portals also act as a mirror of external to internal, encouraging people to look at what corners of their own lives (or interiors) could use attention and care.

As a project raising unanswerable questions, the Corner Portals exist in the liminal state of mystery. By embedding them in multiple locations, their potential is just beginning. During the postgraduate exhibitions at RCA, four of the Corner Portals were embedded in the corners of concrete stairwells of the buildings, accompanied by small poems giving voice to these beings. These pieces activated the space (in)between official locations for exhibiting artwork and softly asked others to stop/look/pause/engage/think/mesh/become.

For more information please contact hello@formina.co