Episode 3: Talking with Deborah Bell
Deborah Bell attended the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, where she learned to paint. Her preference was for large monochromatic drawings reminding us of William Blake. She collaborated with William Kentridge and Robert Hodgins in making the Hogarth series “Industry and Idleness”, and created short humorous animations of stop frame drawings, using Amiga computers in the 1980s.
Debbie and I shared studios at the Bag Factory in Johannesburg and both attended Kim Sacks ceramic workshops, where we both made ceramics, and attended a Nesta Nala workshop in making Zulu chocolate clay, coil pots with figures on the top. It was then that Debbie began to make a series of crying pots and large African figures with distinctive hand gestures. These have since been exhibited in the UK. Her spiritual work, influenced by meditation and mindfulness practice, show her belief in art as a way of bringing her aspirations into being.
Her images, she says, are about herself and the significant others in her world, and within the African landscape, she reveals her deep cultural affiliations. Deborah speaks about the process of art making as following accidents and metaphors, memories (linked to her own life situation) of rocks, lions, and other subjective forms that she allows to surface, and these symbols provide an important bridge to becoming the self she hopes to be.
She fuses herself with the world and others symbolically, saying her art is not a political statement. Her figures have a spiritual authority because they speak, in an archetypal way like Henry Moore and Barbra Hepworth, to our shared symbolic meaning. Through the authority of her forms their colour and human gestures of love, and suffering she transforms and surrenders, binding us together in the felt reality of somatic experience her beautiful images and objects are simply magic, they transform our longing into recognisable form. That of becoming together.
Images below with permission from Deborah Bell. The artist’s opinions are their own. Audio edits by Dan Dewes. “East West Village” by Tim Garland & Asaf Sirkis.
