Welcome to the ART BUBBLE Artists in Conversation video series where I talk with other contemporary artists.
Ellen Bell and Catherine Wynne-Paton got together in April 2017 to talk art, text and theatre. Thank you to Richard Booth’s Bookshop in Hay-on-Wye for their welcome and for permission to film in such a fitting location.
In this first short video Ellen Bell and I touch on how she’s always trying to find a better way to say what she’s trying to say, the form her work takes now, the need to make work, of always starting something new and the process always being a new process. About trying to make it not art and of working on the edge…
Ellen Bell’s work is principally text-based. She works directly with books, texts and paper ephemera to create drawings, installations and sculptures that pose questions rather than deliver answers about how we communicate within our familial and intimate relationships.
The nature of language, and, in particular, its limitations as a method of expressing deep and difficult feelings, informs much of her work.
There is an intensity to the work – more akin to writing than drawing – involving a painstaking re-piecing together of texts that offer alternative meanings, narratives and contexts that question the role of language within emotive scenarios. The physicality of the books, the printed surface of the page and the design of the texts play an important role in the making of her work, as does the serendipity involved in the ‘finding’ of them – the musty smell, the grainy texture of the paper, the inconsistent heaviness of some of the type and the dated graphics of the book covers all play their part in seducing her into working with them.
Ellen’s work is pared down, seemingly simple. Some pieces involve a re-making of dictionary pages, where she focusses on a particular word and expands upon its general definition by creating a stream of consciousness narrative that challenges the limitations of its given understanding. Other works feature figurative templates that contain text or other ephemera, such as stamps or fragments of book or magazine illustrations, through which memories are triggered or associations made.
However, as with all drawings, the negative space plays an essential part in the understanding and reading of the pieces. The words and images in these pieces are animated, three-dimensional; they either jut off the page - casting rows of sharp, urgent tick-like shadows - or they undulate, forming an active, physical representation of speech, becoming tangible artefacts of intimate conversations.
In the following video talking about sewing, Proust and time.
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