Pacific Breeze II
07 AUGUST 2021 - 26 SEPTEMBER 2021
Timed Auction
Add to wishlist
78. Bella Easton
(S)POT OF GOLD
The title references the pot of gold that occurs at the end of a rainbow, a metaphor for hope and happiness. I chose to construct a fan around a complete circle in bamboo and Japanese handmade paper. The hand cut, repeated shapes and pencil line drawing combine with the watercolour spectrum, suggesting a spinning rainbow, with the (s)pot of gold at its center (24 carat gold leaf).
Reoccurring references of the rainbow have been used throughout history, culture and religion to define symbols of hope, in particularly the flood story, gay pride and more recent uses for signs of hope during Covid. It is a symbol that speaks to us all and is endemic to the contemporary times we live!
Materials
Bamboo, Japanese paper, pencil, watercolour, 24 carat gold leaf, American walnut
47 x 47 x 7cm
Created 2021
ESTIMATE
£170 - 500
This auction has now ended
Notes
Bella Easton starts with history, and combines the accidental with the generative. Her practice is founded in drawing, typically homing in on domestic details such as the Victorian wallpaper, from which she has made frottage drawings. She recently found a whole section of wall in her house with the ghostly remains of a design that had seeped into the original plaster behind. She has developed, replicated and reflected on that source to generate a complex, intensely gradated, light-filled account of the multiple relationships and contradictions between natural and artificial, open and enclosed, chaotic and orderly, uncanny and familiar. Bella’s method is a hybrid of painting and printmaking: the squares of Bitten By Witch Fever are lithographic prints each pressed onto paper-thin porcelain, in slightly different registrations, around the central axis. The Rorschach-like result is a coming-together that may look like one complete view, but is actually a doubling of two halves. The green colouration refers to the arsenic found in wallpapers from this period: William Morris described the doctors who attributed poisoning to his papers as ‘bitten by witch fever’, wrongly insinuating that they were quacks. - Paul Carey-Kent for Forms of Autonomy, London 2020
https://bellaeaston.com/ABOUT
