Julia Peyton-Jones spoke with artist Oliver Beer (@oliverbeerstudio) for the series Tea with Julia.

Oliver Beer (b.1985, lives and works in London and Paris) studied musical composition at the Academy of Contemporary Music before reading Fine Art at the Ruskin, University of Oxford and film theory at the Sorbonne, Paris. He makes sculptures, installations, videos, and immersive live performances that reveal the hidden properties of objects, bodies, and architectural sites.

Drawing on his musical training, his social and familial relationships often become the blueprint for multi-disciplinary works that engage with intimate and universal concerns, such as the transmission of musical memories and the personal and cultural meanings invested in the things we possess. For his Resonance Project (2007–), vocal performances stimulate the natural harmonics of built structures, generating a disarmingly visceral relationship between the audience and interior space. By slicing and reassembling common objects to construct new meanings and forms, Beer’s sculptural practice dissects the material world and the traces we leave on it.