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Ellen Bell on her work.

“My recent practice has been concerned with revealing what I see as the limitations of written language as a means of intimate expression. For my 'Hard Words' exhibition at The Air Gallery I have created a series of raised text drawings of fictional re-constructed dictionary pages, passages and fragments in order to challenge and stretch the definitions of seemingly prosaic words ('love', 'mother', 'father', 'home', 'marriage', 'family') contained in dictionaries and thesauri and to provide a cultural and personal narrative with which the viewer may or may not engage. This body of work evolved out of an installation, Speaking Soul, I created for the Leicester City Gallery in January 2007. This was a response to a series of workshops that I led with non-English speaking immigrants and refugees that looked at the problematics of getting oneself across through a language that is not a mother tongue, particularly in emotional, heart-felt situations. In October 2008 I begin a PhD at Dartington College of Arts where I will extend this practice by producing a series of alternative 'dictionaries', using both printed text and sound, that offers a more empathic resource when using...

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