Lara Bell
MA Fine Art
University of the West of England Bristol
Specialisms: Fine Art / Sculpture / Film
Location: Bristol, United Kingdom
Lara Bell
First Name: Lara
Last Name: Bell
Specialisms: Fine Art / Sculpture / Film
Sectors:
My Location: Bristol, United Kingdom
University / College: University of the West of England Bristol
Course / Program Title: MA Fine Art
About
I am a disabled, working class artist working across sculpture, moving image, installation and performance.
I am currently completing an MA Fine Art at the University of the West of England (UWE), Bristol.
My practice sits at the intersection of feminism, psychoanalysis, and philosophy, using materials - steel, concrete, human hair, fabric, carpet, film - as a language beyond spoken words.
I'm interested in what happens when the body, memory, and inherited structures of power are made physical: cut, stretched, layered, or left in shadow.
This work explores patriarchal inheritance, the non-linear passage of time and the fragmented aspects of ancient and personal memory.
Using experimental film techniques like slit-scanning and shadow projection to treat time and memory as material things – moments in time that can be distorted, leaked, repeated, and reshaped, these films give all my sculptures their jungian shadows.
During my studies my work has been shown at Royal West Academy, Arnolfini, Opacity (Bower Ashton, UWE), Cellar Door's International Women's Day exhibitions, The Cube Microplex, and Schwartz Gallery, among others, and I was recently selected as a "Sculptor to Watch" by Cellar Door's International Women's Day Programme.
Materials remember. The sickle carries the violence to Cronus, while steel carries us into the Industrial Revolution, when time became measurable, and productivity a measure of human worth. Above this is a 3D-printed Honda fuel tank: a Futurist head, two vulvic openings, modernity’s promise and its wound. Four metres tall, three metres wide, the sculpture seems to lurch from some buried evolutionary past, one leg folded like a dead spider, beautiful, eerily erotic, and failing, dragging itself towards us. The film gives this body a shadow. Icarus burns inside belonging; Apollo fractures time; Cassandra's curse means she speaks unheard. In making it, I discovered the patriarchy living in my own body: hubris, vanity, mastery. This is my monument to survivors of violence -and to the collective demons we must recognise as our own.
Competitions
