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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. There is no dividing line between artist and arts worker in my practice.
I keep finding myself designing shapes that attempt to hold and influence human interactions, however ephemeral or fleeting. The subjective experiences of walks and conversations, the valuing of artistic labour, the lapses intrinsic to archives and documentation, the question of what it is to offer service, and the vagaries of imagined and remembered space, are all themes that keep recurring. My work has been seen and experienced in galleries, on stages and in unexpected locations, indoors and out, in Ireland, France, the UK, and the US.
I talk about and advocate for mitching, slowing down, and travelling without flying. When working with physical materials, they are deliberately tactile, often found or reclaimed, and used in a way that makes the handmade and crafted nature visible. Works can also be ephemeral and only exist in photographs, or other forms of even more unreliable documentation. I think I’m often attempting to draw attention to or commemorate something that is fleeting, resists stasis, and has already begun to fall apart. All aspects of my broad practice overlap aesthetically and ethically, and projects may have unclear beginnings, ends or edges.
I also coach artists and arts workers individually, offer digs in my home so that people working in the arts can visit Dublin affordably, and design and facilitate artists’ programmes in collaboration with a number of different organisations. These all fall under the banner of offering service, and are how I share the resources I have accrued with my community.
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 in 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. In 2015-6, I was Campaign Director of #WakingTheFeminists, the grassroots campaign for equality for women that changed Irish theatre. 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 founding member of the Arts Coaching Collective. 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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