Pacific Breeze II

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

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