Ruth Beardsworth

Ruth Beardsworth was born in Bremen, Germany. She graduated with a BA (Hons) Fine Art from Preston Polytechnic in 1979. This was followed by an MA in Printmaking at Manchester Polytechnic in 1980. She has worked as a lecturer at Gray’s School of Art in Aberdeen and Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, Dundee. Beardsworth was the winner of the Shell Expro Award in 1992 and also received the Glasgow Print Studio Publication Award in 1996.

The artist has drawn on her previous career as a commercial screen-printer since transitioning to the fine arts, focusing primarily on printmaking but incorporating many methods and some found materials into her work. Often starting from the smallest organic detail, she has always created works concerned with the natural world. Landscape is reduced to its essential marks – distilled into basic imagery – whilst exploring the visual tension between realism and abstraction, shape and texture.

Artist biography by Grampian Hospitals Art Trust, 2023.