Chris Bell

Stone Roots
Tuesday 16 January to Tuesday 6 February 2007

Stone Roots

“Our ability to perceive quality in Nature begins, as in art, with the pretty.  It expands through successive stages of the beautiful, to values as yet uncaptured by language” - Aldo Leopold

My work is about the ‘value of beauty’ which the artist struggles to unlock.

I believe beauty is a crucial value in itself.  In our modern dysfunctional world the capacity to perceive and convey beauty may be one of the last sinews that hold us in some sort of communion with Nature.

Nature is my entire world. I need to be constantly immersed in it, for it not only shapes my art but also shields me from the destruction I see around me and the accompanying damage to our thinking. Nature is an infinite repository of raw material which we can transform into art.

Almost all of my work is undertaken in remote areas.   I go there to re-affirm the alliance with the Earth I carry in my heart. I go to the natural world partly for its physicality, which, as a photographer I want to celebrate; but I also go there for what these places can teach us.  In the wild, there are places which reassure us by their harmony, and challenge us to explore untouched intellectual spaces. There, through reflection, we may uncover that other dimension which we subliminally recognise but which we largely dismiss or ignore: That which is other.

Those among us who seek this thing we now call wilderness cannot know it entirely through rational thought, or convey it through language.  Intangible abstracts such as love or beauty are seldom articulated adequately, and so it is with our wilderness. We can feel it, and feel our connection with it, but finally, our experience of it is inexpressible. The importance of this thing called wilderness can never be ignored, dismissed nor trivialized. All life is inextricably linked.

This is where we have our roots!

Chris Bell
Hobart, 2007

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