Beth Dillon (b. 1987, in Sydney, Australia) is an artist working across performance, text, video installation and costume and stage design. She is currently based in Bienne, Switzerland.
Dillon’s itinerant practice dwells in the zones between labour and leisure in contemporary lifestyles. Working site-specifically, she uses forms of experimental fieldwork to inhabit and interrogate the possible roles that artists perform within consumer capitalist systems. Previous projects have explored artistic labour and identity through the figure of the nomad, tourist, service-provider, undercover investigator and clown. Dillon’s practice is currently embedded in the ambivalent exhilaration and exhaustion of mothering, approaching the daily materials and relations of infant caregiving as a site of artistic investigation.
Since 2013, Dillon has worked with Australian artists Lachlan Herd and Kieran Bryant as 110%. Their collaboration stems from the intimacy and playfulness of friendship, growing through conversation, humour, and mutual care. 110% investigate competitive cultures of self-improvement; test forms of hosting and participation; and consider the impact of long distance separation on collaborative practice. These works may take the form of an interruption, an invitation, an oasis, a sweaty mess.
Dillon also collaborates with Swiss dancer and choreographer Gregory Stauffer to produce scenography, costumes and video for touring stage works.
Her solo and collaborative works have been presented in Australian festivals and exhibition spaces including Liveworks, Soft Centre, Next Wave, Underbelly Arts, Perth Institute of Contemporary Art, Campbelltown Arts Centre, VIVID Sydney, Casula Powerhouse, Firstdraft Gallery, Bus Projects, Metro Arts, 55 Sydenham Rd, the Incinerator Artspace, SafARI, and Mildura Palimpsest. Internationally she has participated in Project Space Festival and Month of Performance Art (Berlin), TETEM (Enschede), Lausanne Underground Film Festival, the DAF and Festival des idées à but non-lucratif (Geneva). Her work has been supported by the Australia Council’s ArtStart Program, Copyright Agency Ignite Career Fund, the Australian Postgraduate Award and Research Excellence Award (UNSW), and the Sainsbury Sculpture Grant (NAVA).
Dillon holds a Master of Fine Arts (Research) from UNSW Art and Design, and a Bachelor of Fine Arts (1st Class Hons) from the College of Fine Arts, Sydney. She has been artist-in-residence at the Embassy of Foreign Artists (Geneva), Cité Internationale des Arts (Paris), ARE Holland (Enschede), Agora Affect (Berlin), SIM (Reykjavik) and Listhus Artspace (Olafsfjordur).