DEBORAH BELL

• Information
• Extract from Book
• Images from Book
• Details of book
• Review
• www.davidkrutpublishing.com

Deborah Bell [TAXI-010]
ISBN 0-9584496-1-9

Deborah Bell is a leading Johannesburg painter and sculptor whose work is created in dialogue with multiple worlds, texts, histories and consciousnesses. She is also widely known for her collaborative projects with William Kentridge and Robert Hodgins. Bell's drawings, etchings and monumental clay sculptures possess a kind of 'mystical godliness' which comes from deep within her. Her art making is a spiritual practice in which the role of the artist is to 'co-create the world, to materialise what exists and has existed for all time¹. Inspired by museum objects from ancient civilisations, including African, Babylonian and Egyptian, her work incorporates multi-layered references to past and present worlds. This connection to ancient sources and memories is linked to her spiritual beliefs and how she defines herself as an artist in Africa, working with materials such as clay and bronze.

This book is the first overview of Bell's body of work and includes a variety of authors and different forms of writing. Together, these voices provide the reader with a multi-perspectival view into the many contexts in which Bell's work can be viewed, thought about and read. The artist's voice is strongly present in her writings from her personal notebooks. In the section on her collaborations with William Kentridge and Robert Hodgins, all three artists reflect independently on the nature of Bell¹s contribution to the various printmaking and film/video projects. A conversation on her Unearthed sculptures with Achille Mbembe,renowned social theorist from Wits Institute of Social and Economic Research, opens up important debates around histories, geographies and artistic appropriation.

Pippa Stein, author and compiler of this book, is a writer and teacher in the School of Literature and Language Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. She has published widely in the area of culture, literacies and education.

TAXI is a series of titles on contemporary South African artists, initiated in 2000 by the French Institute of South Africa (IFAS) and Pro Helvetia Arts Council of Switzerland, and published by David Krut Publishing. The series aims to extend the profile of South African artists both locally and abroad and to develop an active educational programme and teaching resource archive.

TAXI-010 was funded by the French Institute of South Africa (IFAS), Pro Helvetia - Arts Council of Switzerland, the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation, the Royal Netherlands Embassy and the National Arts Council of South Africa (NAC).

back to top

We have forgotten who we are.
We have become trapped in the experience of being in our physical bodies.

We have lived many many times before.
We have been all things. 

We are all God.
We are individual sparks from the original Source [zero point].

Our journey is to ‘make known the Unknown.
To expand the Mind of God through our individual experience.

God is not outside of us. God is within.     
We are far greater than we know.

Infinity expands in both directions - within and without.
Our bodies and brains are the tools that connect the two.

All things exist at all times in infinite possibilities.
As the Observer, we can call them into material being.
We can fix them though our intent, from pure potential energy, into mass.

***

I have a sense of having lived many, many times on this earth.
I have fleeting memories and visions of landscapes and cities.

When I walk through museums, I am drawn to this greater memory of Self which extends far beyond human existence.

When I work on my sculptures, they reveal themselves to me.
I don’t feel that I consciously make them, yet I know exactly how to make them.
It is as if I made them before, as if I had been them before.

I am the lovers walking in the desert. I am the solitary figure of Ulysses.
I am the floating Magdel spoons. I am the Horse and Rider.
I am the Unearthed and the Sentinels holding my world in focus.
All these people are on a journey and it is my journey.

I cannot create anything that is not my self.
I cannot experience what I have not owned.
Male or female, I am all.

back to top

IMAGES FROM THE BOOK

back to top

DETAILS OF BOOK

back to top

REVIEW

Bell’s personal alchemy

By Miranthe Staden-Garbett
Pretoria News, Tuesday August 17 2004

In Bells’ art we can trace her search for self. The book begins with a fascinating chapter entitled Home The Journey in which Pippa Stein traces the main themes in Deborah Bell’s work. They include: the influence of Max Beckhamnn; gnosticism; the idea of a layered reality and the journey of unraveling the inner truths; a self which is expansive and spiritual in nature; secret threads and revelations; beauty through transformation and exciting the labyrinth of sensation. Immediately, and without further ado. I am hooked.
It is apparent that through her work she conceives of and creates a personal alchemy, in which she is the base metal and her art, the purifying process. In this way she expands, dissolves and distributes herself into her work, blending her experiences and memories with the symbols and stories of other places and times.
In this regard, she tells of a visionary experience where she finds herself traveling through ancient cities, space and galaxies, uncovering layers of ancient memory and lamenting the ubiquitous violence and strife that so characterizes our part of the universe.
This introduces us to the multiple worlds, texts, histories and consciousnesses that inhabit the artist’s canvas and clay. She regards herself as a Gnostic and she has been influenced by the teachings of Ramtha. In gnosticism, knowledge is the central theme, a means, as it were, of returning to the center, where the “divine spark is awakened and integrated to the divine source”.
This knowledge is gleaned through various processes. One of these is the process of “being analogical”, of being in perfect alignment, “as if you are completely reflecting what is coming through, a feeling where everything flows”. This feeling of oneness, or lack thereof, is reflected in her processes and the final objects.
Tense memories and threatening moods filter through the illicit Lovers in a cinema, 1985 and The Rape of Persphone, 1986. This struggle of wills and blind passion transforms into another kind of love in later works such as Point and Counterpoint II, 1991 and The one is but the shadow of the other, 1991.
In these, the couples “stand alongside each other as equals, as mates who no longer seek the pleasures of the flesh in the form of narcissistic gratification. On a joint pilgrimage, they are in a point-counterpoint relationship: connected, yet apart, opposite yet the same.”
The book includes the animations she produced in collaboration with Robert Hodgins and William Kentridge, namely: Hotel (1997), Easing the passing (of the hours) (1992) and Hogarth in Johannesburg, Little Morals and the Ubu 101 series. Hodgins describes this process less as collaboration, than as a mutual agreement “ to do work with a common theme, each pursuing his own way into the theme… a comradely friction that produces unexpected sparks”. He describes how “ Deborah digs into the situation… scrapes her way into her image – ferociously”.
Kentridge remarks on her receptivity, her “active engagement with material and recognition of what emerges from the place, both anticipated and unexpected”. He interprets her working process as “ an ongoing series of invocations to the plate, a sequence of call and response.
Whether the calls are to the unconscious or to ancestral figures, does not seem vital to me. The heart of it is bringing out images, which are both from and beyond the artist. It seem that Deborah is regarded as a giant by giants. She says she contrasts her personal emotional tendencies with their sense of irony, allowing it to rub off somewhat on her process.
Her collaboration with Hodgins and Kentridge have produced some excellent work-indeed, they represent the cream of the crop. On her most powerful works are The crying pots, 1998 and the Un-earthed series, 2001. These pots evoke the wailing grief, which assaulted the artist during TV airings of the Truth and Reconciliation hearings.
The result seems not overtly political, but the product of an intimate experience, a personal response to the stories of those whose families had been destroyed. For Bell, “they became symbolic of the horrors of our history. The crying and the wailing was in many ways cathartic, and in head it grew: it became a large wailing for all the other horrors, the wars in Rwanda, Burundi, Bosnia. The wailing grew and grew until it became mother earth lamenting the history of mankind”.
In their making “the bowl of the pot became a symbol of the earth, the gesture of pain became a cry and a prayer”. The pot is for her, though small, utilitarian and domestic, worthy of monumental rendering, an empowering symbol of womanhood, one that suggests fertility, birth, and nourishment, the blending of different culture and histories. They are sacred vessels of the spirit, linked to death and marriage. For Bell, the figurative midwife, they symbolize the promise of new birth emerging from the marriage of cultures.
For the lucid Achille Membe, the Unearthed figures “ evoke a lot of things…. a multiplicity of universes” which include Bernin art, Egyptian and Babylonian art and the “world of specters”.
These sculptures, moulded from terracotta and bronze, are manifestations of the artist’s quest to “journey home”.
For some quirky reason, the mere word sentinel sends a sentient shiver up my sentient spine to my sentient mind. So, when Pippa Stein refers to Bell’s view that her Sentinels, 2003, are not created “but carved out of what already exists in the block of clay”, something sentient shivers back.
Deborah is dabbling with the magic here. She says she chose to make nine Sentinels (five in terracotta, four in white clay) because nine is one of the mystical numbers. Her sentinels are “our protectors, symbolizing fortitude, constancy and eternal stability”.
Through this I deduce that her reputed intuition or receptivity is one that is guided or structured a precise template of mystical knowledge and symbolism. This evokes a process reminiscent of the way in which tradition and innovation marry in the African art and ritual.

back to top