Known for her work exploring the relationship between the body and architecture, Speed works across sculpture, drawing, performance and film. Her practice often takes the power dynamics embedded in built spaces as a starting point, alongside an exploration of how people are shaped by the buildings they inhabit, and how they occupy their own psychological space. She plays with scale and creates layers around the body, often through hybrid forms that bring together clothing and architecture.
Speed has had solo presentations at Tate Liverpool, Tate St Ives, TRUCK, (Calgary) and Fort Worth Contemporary Arts (Texas). She has been commissioned to make performances for Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Laumeier Sculpture Park (St Louis) and Edinburgh Art Festival among others. Group exhibitions include Drawing Room (London), A Woman’s Place (Knole House), and The Happenstance (Scotland + Venice at the Architecture Biennale, 2018). Speed was Derek Hill Foundation Scholar at the British School at Rome in 2014. She studied BA (Hons) drawing and painting at Edinburgh College of Art, before completing an MA in Fine Art: Drawing at Wimbledon College of Art. Speed lives and works in the Northwest UK.
I was awarded an RSA John Kinross Scholarship to Florence in 2001 and managed to stretch my six weeks in Florence into around three months, and with the gift of free museum entry and time, I was able to explore the city and its museums, travel further into Tuscany and Umbria, and experience so much art and architecture. I already had a deep love for Trecento and Quattrocento art, but the John Kinross Scholarship enabled me to begin understanding where my own work sat in relation to fictional, theatrical and flattened space. This has remained a cornerstone of my practice ever since.
Three years later, in 2004, I was awarded an RSA residency at Hospitalfield. It was here that I was able to really play and experiment, and to begin developing a site-specific approach that would run through my practice for at least the next decade. Both opportunities placed me within cohorts of other artists, and so much learning happened through those encounters; these new peers expanded my ways of making and thinking, and, at Hospitalfield, of collaborating. For someone without financial means, these periods of supported time were transformative. They gave me the space and freedom to make significant leaps in my understanding of my own practice, while also providing the opportunity to produce work and take risks that would otherwise have been difficult to sustain.
