ARTIST STATEMENT

Bell is a contemporary arts practitioner predominantly working with film, stop-motion animation and puppetry. Since her BA(Hons) at Gray’s School of Art in 2012, her work has explored the ecology of imagination and objects in relation to ideas of re-enchantment and the animation of matter.

After completing an MFA at Duncan of Jordanstone in 2019, cultural epidemics such as mental pollution, internalised violence and the nature of total positivity have become the backbone to her work. Surrealism, magical realism and ideas relating to temporality and philosophies of the imagination continue to infuse her practice.

The seed title for most pieces and areas of research are ‘There is more to life than the s*** we got stuck with. Art and a sense of re-enchantment is needed'.

Further profiles of Bell's work...

“The counterpart as the presence of the Other is increasingly disappearing from contemporary perception and communication. More and more, the counterpart degenerates into a mirror which mirrors oneself. All attention is focused on the ego. It is surely the task of art and literature to de-mirror our perception, to open it up to the counterpart, for the Other – as a person or an object. Today’s politics and economy of attention direct this towards the ego; it serves a self-production. It is increasingly withdrawn from the Other and led to the ego. Today, we compete mercilessly for attention. For one another, we are shop windows vying for attention.” (Byung-Chul Han, Expulsion of the Otherness).

“Interpretation takes the sensory experience of the work of art for granted, and proceeds from there. This cannot be taken for granted, now. Think of the sheer multiplication of works of art available to every one of us, superadded to the conflicting tastes and odors and sights of the urban environment that bombard our senses. Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience. All the conditions of modern lift - its material plentitude, its sheer crowdedness-conjoin to dull our sensory faculties. […]What is important now is to recover our senses, We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more. Our task is not to find the maximum amount of content out of the work than is already there. Our task is to cut back content so that we can see the thing at all.” (Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation).