Kate Bell – Poetics of Place

About

Kate’s work is concerned with concepts relating landscape to philosophical thought about place and space. She is concerned with nature and transitional space, questioning the boundary between representation and pure abstraction, and expanding the notion of how land and seascape are explored and understood.

Her creative practice stems from a fascination for the spiritual connection between land, sea and sky, nature and mythology. The fragile boundary separating figuration and abstraction underlies her work. Her paintings are an emotional encounter, an embodiment of a sense of place through a continual dialogue between real and imagined geographies, both physical and psychological. 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. Kate knows the landscape of Gower well, having lived there most of her life and this helps her to work through sketches and paintings both in the environment but also through memory and imagination back in the studio.

Kate is a professional Artist, Lecturer and Creative Agent for Arts Council of Wales. Primarily a painter, she has worked in ice and glass. For the past 30 years she has taught Art and Design in Secondary, Further and Higher education. She has an MA in Fine Art: Contemporary Dialogues from Swansea College of Art, UWTSD

She has had several exhibitions in Wales and London and has works in private collections in the UK and Australia. She was recently awarded First prize at Queen Street Gallery Open, where she will have a solo show in February 2020.

Kate works from the Elysium Artist Studios in Swansea city centre.

www.katebellart.com