Camera Obscura & Other Stories

Solo Exhibition of new work by Ellen Bell

Have you ever picked up a photograph from a flea market or looked through a family album of relatives you have never known and wondered what they were thinking or feeling? Have you ever imagined what dialogue may have taken place before and after the click of the shutter?

Ellen Bells new collection of work seeks to explore these questions. She is concerned with familial memory - conversations had, clothes worn, books read, intimacy lost and found. Pre-digital images from bygone eras that reveal children and adults caught in stiff awkwardness before the camera are the starting point for these pieces. Bell extracts outlines of figures and extraneous details from these photographs and deftly inserts undulating threads of words and sentences cut from works of contemporary fiction into these forms.

Universal stories flood these vessels filling in for the silent, the mis-remembered, the forgotten and the unknown conversations of the past.

Bell is represented by Four Square Fine Arts. She has exhibited in London, New York, Chicago and Miami and her works are held in private collections in Europe, Australia and the USA.