Ellen Bell

Ellen Bell has degrees in Illustration and Theatre design and an MA in Fine Art. She is a conceptual artist who in her recent work has manipulated text and paper ephemera into garment forms that communicate complex messages about language and identity.

The starting point for Ellen Bell’s work were the Woman’s Own and Woman’s Realm magazines which lay around her mother’s house during her childhood. Recipes, fashion suggestions, romantic serials are what she remembers through her mother. Although there is a mockery in using them because of their obvious superficiality they also provided a gel and method of conformity for women at that time.

Ten years of Theatre Design and the making of costumes for others inspired Ellen to make something look like a garment but close-up you realise it can’t be worn. Her work is encased like museum pieces, protecting the fragile tissue paper clothes from clumsy human hand. Carefully and expertly sewing them from original patterns, Ellen uses household bits and pieces from the past such as laundry bills, old pound notes and dollar bills, food labels, recipes, extracts from old magazines and dictionaries, to weave a deeper meaning into her pieces.

Bell states: “It is the stuff of ordinary domestic life that interests me, the mundane, the uneventful, the unheroic, the quiet, the routine, the monotonous and the repetitive. To do this I remake skirts, petticoats, underwear, corsets and dresses.”

In Ellen Bell’s exquisitely-told garment-stories, full of spellbinding transformations and dangerous enchantments, pointed allusions, scabrous wordplay and sly visual puns, the domestic idiom of dressmaking, a product of the hidden, circumscribed endeavours of women and girls has been unsettlingly miniaturised and applied to the suggestive material of paper. Paper is not the durable stuff of clothing but the fragile medium of advertising, illustrating, instructing, certifying, valuing, packaging and transacting – not then of vesting but of investing. Hidden beneath the delicate threads and button and trim, under the ephemeral scraps, lie the childhood memories, familial myths, re-discovered histories, mother-wisdom, and wives’ tales of centuries.

Tim Travis, Curator Victoria & Albert Museum

Artists' spotlight

Hard Words Exhibition - see this page which includes a downloadable catalogue