Exhibitions
Projects
Below you will find a selection of recently completed projects
Four Square Films
Four Square Fine Arts began working with Last Bus in 2008 to create a series of short interview based artist profiles. Four Square Films focus on artists in their own words and from the second film are supported by insightful footage of studio processes.
The aim of these films is to contribute to a broader understanding of contemporary art practice, whilst stimulating questions about the creative process, nurturing new dialogues between artists, students and art lovers.
We also look forward to including them as a valuable resource within our unfolding educational program. To find out more about this program click here.
About Four Square
Education
In 2009 we set out to develop a range of initiatives that went beyond the traditional exhibiting role of a commercial gallery. Supported and encouraged by the desire of many of the artists we represent, we believed it was time to share, engage and communicate in new ways with young people and adults. Four Square Films, our ongoing series of short documentaries exploring questions that drive the practice of artists working today, was a first step. However this has quickly grown to include workshops, scheduled artists talks, links with schools, and podcasts, so we've decided, the time is right to host these strands together on a sister site devoted to our educational work.
Visit our sister site: Four Square Arts Education
Contacting Four Square
Four Square Fine Arts, 5a, Station Street, Lewes BN7 2DA
Tel: 01273 474005 Mob: 07742 659446 Please call to make an appointment to see work in stock.
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Please include your name, address and contact details.
Ellen Bell
Ellen Bell has studied a variety of disciplines including Illustration and Fine Art which have helped her to create beautiful conceptual works communicating complex messages about language, identity and relationships. She is currently studying for a practice-based PhD in the influence of arts practice on intimate communication within couples. Her research programme is based in the School of Art and Performance at Dartington College of Arts which is now part of the University College Falmouth.
Bell specialises in using found ephemera in her work gathered from everyday life – books, dictionaries, magazines, streetmaps, postage stamps from bygone eras. These materials, having been used and discarded by previous owners, have an appeal because of the associations and allusions created in the artists’ mind and which can then be transformed into a new artwork. These associations are often humorous, sometimes with a narrative and also possessing a serious undertone.
A combination of text and stitch in her previous work led to the creation of beautiful miniature garments often relating to the period of history from which they came, for example, Body Language 2005, is a series of miniature corsets made from pages of an original edition of Samuel Johnson’s dictionary circa 1780, mounted and framed within a clear perspex museum case. As Bell’s ideas have developed over the years, she has become more interested in communicating ideas about language and in her new body of work explores language used in intimate and passionate encounters – the text now becoming her central focus.
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Works like Sleeping Dictionary, 2007 outlines the passage of a relationship from romance, love, courtship, marriage through to divorce – its list of adjectives from a 1944 edition of an English-French Dictionary forms a disquieting narrative of the missed beat between lovers and in addition hints at a bittersweet history between nations.
Ellen Bell creates her work with precision and a meticulous attention to detail. Although more commonly working on a small scale and with visually monochrome compositions, colour and texture is created in the mind by the profound effect the works have on one’s own individual thoughts, associations and experiences long after the work has been viewed.
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Next Event
Please email sonia@foursquarearts.co.uk regarding work available and making an appointment.
Solo Exhibitions
Next Solo Exhibition Planned
April 2011
Hard Words
9th - 13th September 2008
Four Square Fine Arts is delighted to announce this forthcoming exhibition “Hard Words” by Ellen Bell to be held in the Lower Level of the Air Gallery, London W1. It constitutes the first commercial exhibition by Bell for several years and follows on from her much-acclaimed public art installation “Speaking Soul” held at the City Gallery in Leicester in February 2007.
Ellen Bell (born 1962) has produced a series of text ‘drawings’ that offer both alternative meanings and readings of a series of seemingly prosaic nouns, verbs and adjectives. These drawings, fastidiously formed to represent the formal page layouts of dictionaries, phrase books and thesauri (those traditional repositories of accepted linguistic definition), read as stream of consciousness lists peppered with archaic, long-lost phraseology heavy with alliteration. The raised words of these works literally animate the language as they jut off the page, casting rows of sharp, urgent, tick-like shadows.
Through this series of work Bell is attempting to stretch the limitations of written language as a means of intimate and impassioned expression. Words such as ‘mother’, ‘daughter’, ‘son’, ‘wife’, ‘home’ and ‘family’ are offered up via a kind of serendipitous, scalpel-led, culling of selected tomes from which the found words are heavily redolent of the mind-sets and prejudices of the time. In works such as ‘Love (Pistol)’ and ‘Love (Bag)’ Bell uses templates of euphemistic objects to lend impact to the text. In other pieces, such as ‘Happy’’ a map is employed in the place of text, suggesting perhaps that in some cases words are not enough.
Ellen Bell will be giving a talk during the course of the exhibition.
For further information please email info@foursquarearts.co.uk
Exhibition Catalogue Download (PDF 3.64MB)
Timepiece, 2009
Ellen Bell completed Timepiece for a client in 2009. The client was already a big collector of Ellen’s work and understood the intellectual connections and references she made in her work. As a clockmaker, his brief was to create a text-based work about the subject of Time, incorporating a horological dictionary and magazines that he possessed from the early twentieth century. The clock shape was based on a favourite ”Empire“ clock from the nineteenth century that the client had restored. Ellen settled on this shape because of the way it would lend itself to a two-dimensional form. In conjunction with some of Ellen’s own found ephemera she was able to create an intelligent and humorous work tailor-made for its owner.
