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Artist Spotlight
Ellen Bell
Ellen Bell has degrees in Illustration and Theatre design and an MA in Fine Art. Training in all these disciplines have helped her to create beautiful conceptual works which communicate complex messages about language and identity and relationships.
Bell specialises in using found materials in her work gathered from everyday life – books, dictionaries, magazines, postage stamps from bygone eras – these have been used and discarded and have an appeal because they promote associations and allusions in the artists’ mind which can be incorporated into a new work. 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 - Body Language a series of miniature corsets made from pages of an original edition of Samuel Johnson’s dictionary circa 1780. As her ideas have developed she has become more interested in communicating ideas about language and in her new body of work explores language used in intimate and passionate sometimes sexual encounters – the text now becoming the central focus of her work.
Pieces like Thoughts on a Meeting – text from an 1860’s edition of Wilkie Collins’ Woman in White appearing as a three-dimensional tangled spiral representing the physical movement of words as they flow out in all directions and hints at misunderstandings and miscommunications between the characters. Similarly Sleeping Dictionary outlines the passage of a relationship from romance, love, courtship, marriage through to divorce - its list of adjectives from a 1944 copy of a Dictionary on the English and French language forming a disquieting narrative of the missed beat between lovers and hinting at a bittersweet history between nations. Containing Passion uses words from a 1950’s edition of George Eliot’s Middlemarch and used 1940’s theatre programmes.
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 is created in the mind by the profound effect the work has on one’s own individual thoughts, associations and experiences long after the work has been viewed.
Four Square Fine Arts will be holding Bell’s first selling exhibition since 2005 in September 2008 at the Air Gallery in central London before embarking on her PhD in Fine Art. For more details please contact the gallery.