Kate Bell
swansea
Kate Bell is a fine artist, creative practitioner and lecturer living in Mumbles. She has been teaching art for over thirty years in both secondary and further education, and completed an MA in Fine A
My work is concerned with concepts relating landscape to metaphysical thought about place and space. My practice is concerned with nature, transitional space and the phenomenology of place, questioning the boundary between representation and pure abstraction, and expanding the notion of how land and seascape are explored and understood.
The coastline, the edge of landscape, is a place where perception can be transformed and altered by memory and imagination. It is at a point where the veil between the two worlds of land and sea is the thinnest, exploring both the conscious and unconscious. It is a place where we make the greatest connection.
My creative practice stems from a fascination for this spiritual connection between land and sea, sea and sky, nature and mythology. My paintings are not a direct representation but more an embodiment of a sense of place through a continual dialogue between real and imagined geographies. Anomalies in land and seascapes harbour portals into other worlds through cracks, crevices, fissures, alignment of stones, sea caves, and the shoreline – thin places.
A close relationship with the Gower coast has provoked an on-going series of work, most recently paintings have been inspired by the poetry of Vernon Watkins, the Welsh metaphysical poet who also lived on the coast of Gower. The concept of space, both actual and pictorial; implications of time and space, movement through shifting tidelines, weather and light materialise in these paintings. Watkin’s work responds to our coastal landscape, through experience, myth and legend. I am fascinated by combining these two art forms, responding to his poetry through line, colour, texture and shape. I know the landscape of Gower well, having lived here most of my life and this helps me to work through sketches and paintings both in the environment but also through memory and imagination back in the studio.
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