Skip to main content

Ellen Bell

Aberystwyth
Conceptual artist working with text and textiles through performance.
Contact
Links

With projects like Mordant (2015), in which overheard speech was captured and embedded into gallery walls, Call Me (2015), where fictional dialogues were reassembled as one incessant, spectral, phone call and sited in a public call box, Talk to Me (2011), in which a ‘conversation’ was constructed in an arts space from a continuous line of open novels and Billet Doux (2013), in which miniature nineteenth-century love notes were anonymously posted in library books, it is evident that all forms of linguistic communication have underpinned and informed Ellen Bell’s recent visual arts practice.

However, since completing an MA in Creative Writing Bell’s research has focussed more upon what Christine Bayles Kortsch refers to as the ‘dual literacy’ of sewing and writing. Though still making use of randomly-found texts and eavesdropped-speech, Bell’s current interest is more in making connections between the act of ‘making’ words and that of writing them. ‘Nothing has really happened unless it is written down’, said Virginia Woolf. As a method of reactive, journalistic transcribing, needlework is a slow, laboured one - one that demands a concentration on the performing of it rather than just its content. Words become disembodied symbols, shapes and pictures – their literal meaning on hold. The daughter of a seamstress for whom English was not the mother-tongue, by embroidering her texts Bell is re-visiting, re-embodying a state of mis-communication - language before, and beyond, understanding.

 

 

 

 

Become a member

We support our members with: insurance, networks, space, opportunities, R&D awards, profiling, advice and mentoring.
Become a member