Kirsty Bell: Faces

Since graduating from Gray’s School of Art at Robert Gordon University in 2023, Kirsty Bell has been the recipient of several awards and opportunities. One such opportunity, the Freelands Studio Fellowship, has made it possible for her to spend a year developing her painting practice within the art school at Ulster University. The fellowship has offered Kirsty the time and space to move beyond the confines of the studio and situate her work in relation to a more expansive dialogue: ‘It's given me confidence, not just in my making, but in talking about my work and thinking about how my studio practice can be part of a broader conversation, rather than existing in isolation.’ For Kirsty, the fellowship is not only about making but about learning to see her work in relation to others – to teaching students and to the wider context of contemporary painting. She has particularly enjoyed exploring how her studio practice uniquely interacts with teaching.  

While preparing for my studio visit, I studied Kirsty’s work online, but I was surprised by what I encountered in the studio: the dedicated time and space of the fellowship seems to have been a catalyst to alter her practice quite dramatically. When I arrived, the walls were lined with smallish oil paintings of portrait heads of women. I soon learned that ‘portrait’ does not describe the paintings, since the faces are based on images found in vintage fashion magazines, then collaged and digitally manipulated.  

Sometimes Kirsty’s collages stand as finished works. At other times they serve as the basis for a painting, as in the case of Clip, a voluptuous depiction of a collaged rose and satin ballgown done in sepia tones. Softly blurred edges in the painting recall the work of Luc Tuymans or Gerhard Richter. More often, however, combinations of found imagery are manipulated and layered in Photoshop – ‘collaged twice’, as she puts it. The result of this process can be clearly seen in Doe, a painting of a woman wearing pearls and a sheer mask covering her eyes which, on close inspection, is a composite of two faces digitally merged prior to painting. Kirsty told me that there is also a bronze mask buried in the image.  

Scanning the studio, I realised that all the women’s faces are masked. This feature recalls the collages of John Stezaker, much admired by Kirsty. Especially relevant in this context is his ‘Mask’ series in which a vintage postcard of a landscape is strategically superimposed upon the photographic portrait of a film star. Both artists are interested in the afterlife of images, that is, in reanimating the archive of obsolete imagery. They introduce an element of facial disfiguration which slows down the viewer’s perception by impeding immediate image recognition. In this way, attention is focused on the image itself rather than the object represented. In Kirsty’s case, however, attention is drawn to the image as rendered in paint. She hopes that, through the process of painting, ‘the immediacy, physicality and material presence of the passages of paint’ will emerge. At the same time, ‘the collage as a source begins to slip away as a reference’, lost in ‘moments of entropy, facture or collapse’.  

One of Kirsty’s paintings, developed in her studio at Ulster University, derives from a collage of a ghostly woman’s face and a landscape. Dove resembles a double exposure, although the two elements were actually combined digitally by adjusting the level of opacity. A strange mask covering the eyes is loosely based on a photograph of the branch of a tree. The final step in Kirsty’s process, responding to the digital collage, further transforms the image by rendering it more elusive and calling attention to the painted surface. Suit takes the trope of masking to an extreme: it looks like a woman with grey hair holding to her face a younger face, which is itself masked in grey. I suspect that the weirdness of this and other images is partly the result of the peculiar effects produced by moving between two or more images in photo editing software and encouraging the computer to throw up glitches and unreadable patches – or what she calls ‘digital residues’. 

Stezaker’s ‘Masks’ prompt the viewer to complete partially obscured faces by finding facial features in the landscape. His work appeals to our innate tendency, known as pareidolia, to find a face in a piece of toast or the moon. Kirsty explored this psychological phenomenon in a compelling painting, Caddie, showing a grotesquely comic face seemingly bursting through and obliterating the face of another woman. Her process might be called ‘computer-assisted pareidolia’. She first made a collage of two elements: the face of a glamorous woman covered by a cutout photo of a skirt with flounces and flowers. This preparatory collage was fed into a computer programme which was instructed to find in it the face of a vintage movie star. Struggling, the computer hallucinated the strange face we see in the painting. This process exemplifies the artist’s practice of using digital technology against the grain, forcing it to glitch and hallucinate. 

Kirsty’s innovative digital techniques should not divert attention from the final and most important stage of her process – responding to the preliminary digital ‘sketches’ or paper collages in oil paint. Certain aspects of her process and painterly handling are, for me, comparable to the work of Francis Bacon, for he, too, used photographic technology against the grain. He found inspiration in doubly exposed portrait heads that merged slightly different views. In addition, Bacon made swift, nonrepresentational marks with his brush in ways that translated and animated the photographic facial distortions. Christopher Hanlon – Kirsty’s mentor at Ulster – remarked on the, ‘chance-like quality of Bell’s and Bacon’s brush strokes miraculously forming a face on the brink of dissolution’. As if to draw attention to the painterly surface of all her canvases, Kirsty showed me two abstract works. One of them, Needle, consists of a ground of thickly applied yellowish-brown paint and a single bold horizontal stroke of lime green. The mark is ambiguously a painted mark and a hovering object that throws a depicted shadow. It reminded me of Manet’s single asparagus spear. 

The best of Kirsty’s work sustains a tension between the alluring and the disturbing. Her paintings preserve something of the glossy glamour of her photographic source material. Her subtle colour harmonies are also very appealing. Yet, her distorting superimpositions and passages of painterly chaos are disturbing, perhaps because the face is so vulnerable and bound up with personal identity. As she herself said, it’s a matter of, ‘the gaze being drawn in and kept out at the same time’. Toward the end of my visit, Kirsty spoke of the two sides of her studio at Ulster. On one side, there are collages of found fashion plates with their kitschy glamour. On the other side, there are the lovely liquid paints, soft colours, and nonrepresentational marks. The complexity, beauty and strangeness of Kirsty Bell’s art depend upon her inhabiting both sides of the studio.