Hilary Beauchamp has taught for many years at Holloway Prison, a service for which she has been awarded an MBE, and this first-hand experience of prison life shines through in her work. Her drawings, largely monochromatic pen and ink, are often oppressively cluttered; one image represents the prison’s occupants reduced  to a tessellating pattern of limbs in a comment on overcrowding, while others use the same visual synecdoche to represent the chaos of fights which frequently break out within the prison.  

Where colour is used, it is purposefully and to great effect; a largely black and white image of an inmate who set fire to herself is made all the more horrifying by the inclusion of subtle yet visceral colours to indicate her injuries, while another image exploring the emotional reaction Beauchamp’s teaching triggered in an inmate shows what could be blood, but turns out to be red paint, pouring down one arm.

The drawings are often concerned with scale; in one image, magnified keys dominate the foreground, emphasising the claustrophobia of incarceration, while in another, an inmate who knitted her own escape rope, only to have it undone by prison guards each night in a painfully real perversion of Penelope’s weaving, is represented almost entirely by her knotted limbs, which mimic her knitting, her face barely visible.

Despite the cluttered and often reductive nature of these images, there is in no way a sense that these women are dehumanised by the artist, even if they may be by the prison system itself; a surprisingly delicate painting, entitled ‘Weekly Rations’, shows a cigarette divided into days of the week by an inmate who was short on money and wanted to make it last. It is images like these which give the exhibition a very human element and the feeling that the images represent a genuine snapshot into everyday life for the women within them.

The exhibition also includes Beauchamp’s work from nature: her studies of bat skulls, which are incredibly delicate if disconcertingly mask-like, and her work in collaboration with ceramicist John Dawson, who has also taught at Holloway. The ceramic work is full of variation; some pieces seem to closely follow Beauchamp’s drawings in their graphic monochrome style, while more colourful pieces are an exploration of the popularity of tattooing.

Beauchamp also says that the sides of the ceramics are representative of prison walls, an idea which is played with in many of the pieces; the three-dimensional nature of ceramics is utilised in order to give the work a sense of movement not always possible in two-dimensional media.  Nor is the exhibition devoid of humour; one drawing depicts an inmate’s attempt to escape while concealed within a Christmas decoration. I think that it is this contrast between humour and horror which makes the exhibition such a powerful insight into prison life.