Proof Magazine

Like a long-legged fly upon the stream

His mind moves upon silence.

W.B.Yeats

Step into this space. You have never been here before; already you’re reading the signs. Dried leaves kept from the rain and rot of autumn, have found their way in. Gusted through an open door maybe, but then heaped by a broom or a hand into a broad shape, rounded and pointed - a spear or a leaf, the footprint of a miniature long barrow - at any rate, a marker of some kind. A chrysalis dangles stickily beside a pane of scrap glass propped on one wall. Look closely, and the roughcast stonework, scabbed with limewash, has gullies and ledges where other crumbly detritus of insect life clings - spiderweb stuck with wing bits, fragments of antennae and tiny, unidentifiable exoskeletal shards. Sharp neon green of hartstongue fern horns up from a crack where it’s rooted, lancing its shadow full-stretch over the wall’s gentle, cartographic swell. This place was a byre once; on a cold morning in November it’s ghosted with the old warmth, cow-breath off the fields outside.

Is it possible to tell whether the butterfly has shrugged its way out, rested for its wings to dry and flown, or whether this little integument embalms a mummified, never-to-live form - frozen by frost, or creepily disembowelled by a spider? Is there a difference between a vacant chrysalis that has done its incubatory work and one that hasn’t?

You become aware that this room, which at first looked airily empty, almost, contains a thousand concise signs. Patient, deliberate activity has produced two small, irregular pyramids of ash. They show fingerprints and delicate gougings, like the marks on potsherds. At a certain point (why else would you be here?) the subject of these abandoned or completed acts will be revealed. But it is necessary to wait - wait, that is, for the unpredictable epiphany of stillness. This will happen when the sun slants in, let’s say, at exactly that point along the wall. When the light slices this leftover milkbottle, making its mouldy innards glow with ectoplasmic fervour - then (but only if you are looking) you’ll see. 

Harriet Bell’s studio is part room-of-one’s-own refuge - a place that owes nobody any explanations - and part makeshift laboratory. Like the Wunderkammern, or cabinets of curiosities, of sixteenth-century grandees, it is a place for testing arcane compounds of history and nature, for gauging the power of inanimate objects. It is also an improvised apparatus, delicately adjusted to distil certain essential absences, according to the hypothesis that the most important component of meaning is invariably what is not present. 

So, centuries before the exploration of Africa, the Wunderkammern were crammed with ostrich eggs and twigs from the phoenix’ nest; with crocodile skins and carved divination trays - the strangest and most wonderful artificialia and naturalia of a world that was at the same time physically real and mind-bendingly mythical. The discovery that thought could set out solo to fill the gaps - to capture what was not present - made these places laboratories. Theatres, too, for the imagination.

Bell is a collector, but she specialises in things whose material presence is so vulnerable, so unencumbered that they are hardly ‘things’ at all. Her work sets these players - pieces of folded textile, paper boats, brittle filaments of dried root, eggshells; discarded, ephemeral and often almost weightless objects - to enact a balancing game: on one side the bereft terror of destitution, on the other the balm of simple completeness. In the choice, placing and construction of objects, the spaces between them and the invisible histories of how they came to be there, Bell implies many layers of action and intention, which often seem, in the final work, to have been sifted through and through to the point where their subtle weave becomes a virtual absence. 

This element - this absence-presence - is the most various and flexible of her materials. It has a formal dimension, like the spaces within constellations (creating, say, the spectral stride of Orion), or theatrical space (her work is as much about the arena as about the objects placed within it). It also has an emotional wavelength, tuned in particular to register the slightest movement in the permeable borderlands between death and life. Where Bell arranges objects in space, rather than single pieces displayed on a gallery wall, their absence-presences are always integral to the work. Think, perhaps, of the range of silences that can be keyed by a musical rest. The silence is the listener’s - or viewer’s - own, but it is compelled by the work. In Bell’s case, historical and spatial silences are the clues, the vital links in what could be called an archaeology of absence.

In pieces created in her Tallahassee studio in 1994, embalmed or shrouded figures with plaster masks made explicit the funerary theme. Their relation to other objects - a bare wooden bedframe, a low table, dishes either empty or containing desiccated offerings, and simple elongated forms drawn with pigment on the floor - made palpable the unseen presence of the living. This theme extended into a series of figurines - part diminutive mummies, part pupae. Of her ‘Two Figures’ (‘Shunned’ and ‘Husk’) shown in Florida in 1994, she wrote: 

Although human in configuration, I think of these pieces as being like cocoons, strangely wrought containers for a changing interior life. The ‘Shunned’ is heavily bound and internalised, still closed and full. The ‘Husk’ is split open and vacated. The spirit has flown up.

Following her move to Cornwall that year, Bell’s motif of the mummy/cocoon has been sustained through successive metamorphoses. The emphasis on perishable integuments - shrouds, cerecloths - has shifted towards the Linnaean world of insect and plant life, replacing the frame of archaeological exhumation with the naturalist’s microscope and dissecting kit. She has created books whose stained pages, pasted with moss and grass, hung with pebbles, parody the common notion that scientifically recording a natural process means death by pinning down. She has also produced drawings composed of ambiguous blobs and stains on paper: are these the visceral seepage of something squashed or slain, or the traces of movement, or life-forms under the microscope? Possibly their formal pleasures are a distant salute to Surrealism, in works such as Miro’s postwar Flight of the Constellations images, or in the Surrealists’ heroic grasp of irony, of gravity-defying seriousness. 

Bell has related a ‘lack of interest in “permanence”’ and a renewed preference for disposable, ‘thrown away’ materials in her work of the past decade to the experience of her father’s death in 1990. This did not lead her, however, towards a memorialising or documentary use of objects, as for example in the installations of Christian Boltanski, which construct forms of communal archive to orchestrate the emotional movement between public and private, loss and recognition. Instead, Bell infuses simple, sparely chosen ‘belongings’ with a double, but mute, intimacy: they contain the traces of someone (perhaps dead) who once possessed them, but also the imprint of someone (then, at least, living) who has since handled and shaped them. Works made out of folded cloths were an early expression of this twofold absence, with their record of marks or stains, their aura of ‘disturbed resting places, be it beds or nests’ - clothes discarded, ‘shoes stepped out of’.

Folded cloths, like many of the other objects, manmade or natural, that Bell enlists, bring with them a vast lexicon of associations; the birth- or burial-chamber, bedroom, ethnographic museum or archaeological dig are only the most immediately resonant. These associations work on three planes: through the detailed texture of objects and materials themselves, which Bell typically savours minutely; through the fictive or theatrical arena that they connote (Bell often refers to her bare barn studio as an unspecific ‘room’, enabling it potentially to become many locales); and through the absence-presence of innumerable invisible acts performed. Simple folded cloths (to stay with this example) are almost unbearably pregnant with such acts - dressing or undressing children, wrapping a precious or fragile object, rubbing down walls, floors, the flanks of animals, covering a heap of foodstuffs or a corpse.

This is archetype territory, dangerous ground for the artist, who has to hold the poise between controlling and releasing the flood of associations. The tendency for associative readings of Bell’s work to gather a momentum of their own is evident in Robert Sindelir’s comment that ‘it is not identifiably related to any terrestrial culture, yet there are echoes (remembrances?) of many pasts and, perhaps, premonitions of the future. One can sense associations but cannot verify them.’ This ‘sensation of sensing’ parallels, whether with Navajo sandpainting, Australian Aboriginal carving, ancient Egyptian grave-goods, or the wabi aesthetic of the Japanese tea-masters, is one of the great pleasures for Bell’s audiences. But it can end up as a diversion, through the eclectic Wunderkammern of the art-literate viewer’s own mind. 

In reality, Bell works within a fairly restricted thematic range, in which certain metaphors (rather than associative echoes) emerge as powerful motifs. Take the concept ‘vessel’, which surfaces repeatedly, from her earlier full-scale carvings of boat or seedpod forms to pieces from 2001, in which panes of glass, mounted horizontally at eye-level, act as a solid meniscus that simultaneously bears the upper world while containing the depths, which are themselves magically condensed, like Aladdin’s genie, into old milkbottles. The boat sets out; the pot contains. Are these poetic vessels our rough groundwork for conceptualising life and death; or is it rather that the facts of birth and dying shape the way we feel about pots and boats?

Material art and poetry work such metaphors from opposite ends: in a poem, you can have everything but the actual objects; in the artwork, objects and images can potentially be anything but explanations of themselves. Bell noted that, in making books that contain words alongside images and objects, the ‘words are very difficult because they carry so much meaning - of course that’s the point of them?! - but they carry so much you have to be careful.’ In 1993 she wrote, 

For the past year I have been thinking about the passing of people of no particular importance in life. When I say passing I am not using a euphemism for death but I am interested in a ‘passage’ similar to that described in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and familiar from the lore of many ... cultures concerning the journeying of the dead until a final quiet is reached. My visual work is about any traces made, or given, by the living to aid these journeys.

The journey, of course, is a primal metaphor, possibly shared by all languages. The English word stems ultimately from the Latin dies, a day, and what you can fit into a day. It might be related, here, to the ways in which Bell’s work responds to the sun’s movement from morning to evening (a familiar presence in the studio, a less predictable guest in the gallery). Metaphors, though, have their melting point, in Bell’s works of ‘passage’ it seems futile to distinguish between the hunger of the dead and the ritualised need of the living to assuage this, through food and burial, mourning and home comforts. 

The need to ‘be careful’ with words, so that objects can speak for themselves, may underlie Bell’s dislike of the convention of the artist’s statement. A further problem of translation occurs in the prospect of moving work - things she has made and assembled, but also the actions (now invisible) of their making - out of the studio and into a public gallery. Artists are nearly always ambivalent about this process; for Bell, it exacerbates the tendency of things whose beauty lies in their provisional and unachieved nature to be frozen or elevated into works of art. She invokes the parallel of photography and its famous habit of iconising, even glamourising, pain, patience, inattention, joy - of transmuting the momentaneous into the momentous, trapping a movement of light or emotion like a rare specimen. ‘I don’t want to make “work”,’ she says. ‘Do you understand what I mean by that?’

Yes and no. It is true that the pieces in her studio are always in a state of change. Once they stop being made - being continuously formed, undone, resting between stages - the open-ended rhythm of ritual, repetition, chance is sealed. Bell’s distaste for the concept of the ‘work’ also has a lineage in Art Brut and the idea of art as the artist’s private arena, validated by its very privacy. Nevertheless, although her work often suggests an intensely introspective realm - of just-manageable grief, fascinated scrutiny, or domestic rhythms of orderly tenderness - this is just as often framed within public cultural arenas such as the rituals of burial or the protocol of scientific observation. 

This essay is offered as a brief aid to the time and stillness of looking, especially the tricky business of looking for what’s there in art but not materially present. Harriet Bell’s work suggests that this function of art (however private or public) - to clear a space, a silence where the imagination can stretch at full flood - is one of its most benign and necessary gifts to the age of information overload.

MICHAEL BIRD