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Contact: lian.bell at gmail.com
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I am an artist working across artforms. With a background in scenography, visual art, cultural project management, and social activism, I have worked for over 25 years with some of the most significant arts organisations and contemporary performance makers in Ireland.
My work has been seen in galleries, on stages, and in unexpected locations – indoors and out – in Ireland, France, the UK, and the US. I return to the subjective and ephemeral nature of walks and conversations, the lapses intrinsic to archives and documentation, and the vagaries of imagined and remembered space. I am interested in formally experimental contemporary performance, often collaborating on works that are devised and/or site specific. I bring together groups of artists and arts workers, online and off, to foster solidarity and community across geography and discipline.
I talk and write about mitching, slowing down, and travelling without flying. When working with materials, they are deliberately tactile, often found or reclaimed, and used in a way that renders the handmade, crafted nature visible. Works can also be ephemeral and only exist in photographic documentation, or other forms of even more unreliable documentation. My work often is attempting to hold onto, or commemorate, something that is fleeting, resists stasis, and has already begun to fall apart.
I also design ways to build community and create space for thinking. I coach artists and arts workers individually, and design and facilitate artists’ programmes in collaboration with a number of different organisations. In 2015-6, I was Campaign Director of #WakingTheFeminists, the grassroots campaign for equality for women that changed Irish theatre. All aspects of my practice overlap aesthetically and ethically.
I studied in Trinity College Dublin (Drama & Theatre Studies), Central Saint Martins (Scenography), and the National College of Art and Design (Art In The Contemporary World). I have been on residencies to Centre Culturel Irlandais in France, Arteles in Finland, and Sirius Art Centre, National Sculpture Factory, and Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Ireland, and have received numerous awards for my work. I am a member of IETM international network for contemporary performing arts, the Irish Society of Performance Designers, Performing Arts Forum, Visual Artists Ireland, and Praxis Artists Union. I am a member of the Readers’ Advisory Committee of the National Library of Ireland, and a former board member of Rua Red. And since I spent most of my college years there, I am particularly happy to have been made an Honorary Patron of DU Players, Trinity College Dublin.
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