Nathan Beard is an artist based in Boorloo/Perth who draws from his Australian-Thai heritage to unpack the slippery influences of culture, memory and authenticity. Beard adapts intimate exchanges with family and their archives alongside broader cultural signifiers of ‘Thainess’ to generate idiosyncratic slippages of identity across 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. Recent exhibitions include Low Yield Fruit, sweet pea (2022), White Gilt 2.0, Firstdraft (2020), A dense intimacy (with Lindy Lee), Bus Projects (2019) and WA Focus: Nathan Beard, Art Gallery of Western Australia (2017).

He was a finalist in the Ramsay Art Prize in 2021, and the churchie emerging art prize in 2020. In 2017 Beard was selected for the 4A Beijing Studio Program. In 2022 Beard will be undertaking the Australia Council residency at ACME Studios, London and presenting his solo exhibition A Puzzlement at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts. He is represented by sweet pea and Aster + Asha Gallery.