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of location or for an invitation to the private view of any of the exhibitions listed
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ELLEN BELL: 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)