Wave Theatre

About

Gala Bell is a London based multidisciplinary artist. Engaging with ideas of value, taste, hierarchy and absurd labour, her work is the aftermath of a reaction to substance and situation. Materials and actions become metonymic, swapping roles between quotidian interactions and traditional art processes. Bell is a graduate of the Royal College of Art and City and Guilds Art School London. She has been selected for exhibitions with The Victoria and Albert Museum as part of the Great Exhibition Road Festival, The London Design Festival with Mint Gallery, The Design Museum with Bompas and Parr, Kunsthalle am Hamburger Platz in Berlin, and Galerie der HBKsaar in Saarsbrucken. Bell has had commissions by BBC One and Tate and Lyle for her sugar sculptures, with a piece acquired by the Tate and Lyle Museum archive in London. She has been included in publications with Dazed magazine and Art Reveal, with interviews by BBC One Tribe and The Royal Docks, and an interview feature on To The Studio Podcast.

μόλυβδος / βακτήριον 

Molybdomancy (μόλυβδος/molybdos) lead, is a technique of divination using molten metal. The series explores intuitive metal casting in terracotta and lost wax technique using a white metal alloy to explore the ritual tradition of lead throwing. The cast objects are paired with paintings made using silicone and oil painting pigments, to create a gelatine-like, translucent material resembling fleshy, organic matter. The colouration evolved by looking at microscopic forms of (βακτήριον /bakterion) bacteria, and other unicellular creatures like Diatoms, solitary cells, taking the shape of ribbons, fans, zigzags or stars. Their anatomy consists of a cell wall of made of silica which has the property of structural colouration- the production of colour by microscopic surfaces fine enough to interfere with visible light.

Oil on Canvas

The colour of visible light depends on its wavelength. The colours we see is a result of which wavelengths are reflected back to our eyes and which are absorbed. During the painting process, incremental fractions of paint added to a mixture can change the temperament of a colour, and in turn affect the way that it resonates next to others on a canvas. The canvas becomes an arena for the play between paint as matter and colour as wavelengths, taking from a deluge of images that lie around in the studio and overstep abstractedly into the painting.