Biography
Laura Bell was born in Ohio, raised a Jersey girl, and has maintained a live/work studio in LIC long enough to remember when you had to crawl through a chain-link fence to get to the East River. She studied art at Rutgers and at Goddard College, in Vermont. Her work has been shown in New York, Berlin, Philadelphia, and Chicago, among other locations, and she has been an artist in residence at the Millay Colony.
Artist's Statement
When I began adding photographs to my paintings, I started with land and sea horizon lines, unpeopled vistas. In subsequent series, I have layered into the paint the quintessential stuff of everyday photo albums, buried visuals. Since then, my work has entwined the domestic and feral, synthetic and organic: tide pool, junkyard, desert palm, garden statue, swamp, backyard rabbit. Outlining this is the drama of edges—land meets water, sky meets sea, stem meets earth. Nature is an indifferent witness to the human history playing out in its arena: civilization left unguarded is reclaimed without malice; perennials casually reenact a resurrection each year. "Mutable Gardens" is a series of mixed-media collages (photos, paint, seedpod) on paper that envisions hybrids of flora, fauna, and detritus: furred paws emerging from petals, abandoned cars as fertile bulbs. A state of imbalance persists—a collusion of leaf, claw, and junk.
Email: laurabel@earthlink.net
Website: artistsspace.org
