MORDANT

Intimate conversation, with all its prosaic, repetitive and seemingly uninformative murmurings, has long been the focus of Ellen Bell’s practice. Working directly with novel and play texts, Bell fills templates with undulating lines of dialogue, creating as she does a physical, three-dimensional, manifestation of speech that takes the viewer beyond the mere act of reading. As a practicing artist and writer, Bell’s drawings are also processes in separating and re-writing the manuscripts she selects.

For her show in TestBed she is transcribing these interactions, combining the printing method of letterpress with plaster, to present a facsimile of what she heard that can be both read and felt. MORDANT (from the French to bite) encapsulates the notion that walls somehow absorb the discourses that surround them.

Ellen has exhibited widely across the UK, recently completed an MA in Creative Writing at Aberystwyth University in 2014 as well as an MA in Fine Art at Norwich School of Art & Design in 2001. She lives and works in Aberystwyth.

Ellen Bell writes about MORDANT for the New Welsh Review: http://www.newwelshreview.com/article.php?id=987

Supporting new and experimental work by artists based in Wales and the Borders.