Collective Art Exhibition (5-28 April 2024)
Rebecca Bell
Devotionals: Belonging Remembered
2024
Series of work, Ink and watercolour on paper
As part of the New Starters research programme at UWE, Rebecca Bell is researching post-pastoral materialities through writing, teaching, drawing and painting practices. Four of her recent works are included in the current collective exhibition in the Circular ArtSpace, Fishponds, Bristol (5-28 April 2024).
The series Devotionals explores a sense of simultaneous completeness, bright joy and an ongoing ache of loss experienced on returning to home or heart landscapes. These paintings tentatively hold what it means to be making in a time of environmental precarity and unmaking, and our need to locate deep empathy with human and more-than-human communities. Bell’s wider practice concerns ideas of retreat and renewal in relation to the post-pastoral, using feminist, phenomenological, embodied and sensory approaches. The Welsh Marches are fundamental to her sense of being. As a child, she woke early and spent entire days alone in the woods and hills. It was a space of safety, alignment, and necessity. In leaving to move to cities, she has constantly sought out green spaces and lived in a tension of displacement. These circular works, using ink and watercolour paper, explore how, returning to the borderlands, Bell expands into a sense of full being, but question on what terms she now belongs
Link: https://vasw.org.uk/whats-on/14th-community-art-exhibition