Roberley Bell
Roberley Bell
Workspace Program Resident 2000
Over the past two decades, Roberley Bell as created site-specific installations and sculptures, which often turn into large landscape projects. Her work explores the relationship between the man made and the natural. Her play with nature exposes the artifice of nature and examines ideas in related to the built environment. Exploring themes of time, space, memory and place, her constant juxtaposition of the natural and the artificial demonstrates our control of nature.
During her residency, Roberley Bell worked on a project, which she later titled “Perfect View”. Using watermarked and digitally printed images on handmade abaca paper, Bell continued to explore her interests in domesticity and landscape. Images of distant landscapes are framed by floral watermarks and printed on translucent sheets of paper. The transparent nature of the paper coupled with the decorated frame elicits the memories and feelings associated with looking out on to a landscape through a window.
About the Artist
Roberley Bell (b. western Massachusetts) received a BFA from University of Massachusetts at Amherst and a MFA from the State University of New York at Alfred. She has also studied at the Tyler School of Art and Instituto Allende, San Miguel de Allende in Mexico.
Bell’s artistic work is inspired by nature and time. Her practice draws on the world around her, in particular the scrutiny of nature and the built environment. She spent her childhood in Latin America and Southeast Asia and holds an MFA from SUNY - Alfred. She is the recipient of many fellowships including the New York Foundation for the Arts, a Pollock Krasner Fellowship, and a Senior Scholar Fulbright to Turkey. Her Fulbright project The City as The Site of Intervention resulted in a series of projects in public spaces. Currently, a Fulbright specialist leading walking workshops internationally; recent workshops have been held in Sharjah, UAE, Istanbul, Turkey and Malmö, Sweden.
She has also received several residency awards, both nationally and internationally, including Sculpture Space and the International Studio Program. She was recently awarded a residency at Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, New York and at the Electronic Print Center at Alfred University, Alfred, NY. Internationally she has had residencies at the Stadt künstlerhaus, Salzburg, Austria where she completed the book A Borrowed View, and the National Center for Contemporary Art, Kaliningrad, Russia. Bell’s work has been exhibited internationally and she has completed numerous public projects. Bell lives in rural western New York and is a professor in the College of Art and Design at Rochester Institute of Technology. (Soruce: Artist’s website)
For more information, please visit their website: https://www.roberleybell.com/