Gala Bell

This series of works on silk reflect on an entanglement between self, process, and the absurdity of making. This series of oil and silk paintings is a reflection on surrender, on the paradox of control and chaos in the act of creation. Working in reverse, paint is extruded through silk from the back of the canvas, using light as a guide. The material becomes collaborator and constraint; the delicate weave of silk stretched tight across the frame threatens rupture with every gesture. Each mark, irreversible and obscure from behind, accumulates into luminous, layered surfaces when viewed from the front.

Traditional brushes are replaced with rulers and edges, resisting representation to explore the underside of mark-making; the unseen contact between surface and substance. What emerges is a language of waves, intervals, and translucencies, where the image is not constructed, but revealed. Oil painting pigments are mixed with sugar to create a sticky paste like coloured mass that is pushed through the screen. For Bell, sweetness is a carrier of longing, care, and control, embedded within political histories, functioning simultaneously as sustenance, cultural marker, and ideological tool. In historical socialist contexts, sugar existed as a site of tension, both celebrated and restricted, ordinary and coveted, desirable. Sugar stands in for traditional marble dust, a humorous disruptor in the hierarchy pf painting. This process, precarious and devotional, mirrors a kind of ritualised persistence, the absurdity of striving for something unseen, unknown, and potentially unattainable. Through this work, I seek to dissolve the boundaries between painting as illusion and painting as raw, material inquiry, finding poetics in impermanence, humour in devotion, and control in fragility.