About Me

Kristy Bell enjoys peering into the dark shadows and crevasses, seeking out the things often overlooked in the hustle and bustle of everyday life.  She finds the corner-of-the-eye things; objects half-seen just around that corner, glimpsed for a split second in a flash of lightning, reflected in the mirror, or breathing in the darkness, captures them with pencil or carving tools and holds them hostage on paper or canvas.

Currently working primarily with linocut, her epic mazes explore oblique pathways with fine barriers and multidirectional patterns, and her precisely carved depictions of organic objects are simultaneously unsettling and comforting.  Hand-printing these reliefs with earth-toned inks gives her lines a natural depth that anchors the images to the paper.

By manipulating natural elements and combining them with man-made items she coaxes the hidden into the light, distorts reality, disrupts our sense of what is and replaces what we know to be real with a narrative where fact coexists with fiction. 

“All things bright and beautiful, All creatures great and small, All things wise and wonderful, The Lord God made them all. /The tall trees in the greenwood, the meadows where we play, The rushes by the water, We gather every day. / He gave us eyes to see them, and lips that we might tell, How great is God Almighty, Who has made all things well.” 

 

-- All Things Bright and Beautiful, verses 1, 6, and 7 by Cecil Francis Alexander, 1848