Talk to Me, 2010

5th – 10th March 2010
The Chapel Row Gallery
Chapel Row
Bath

How do you communicate with your lover? According to John Gray, author of Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, men and women talk differently: women use the language of intimacy fluently but men struggle with it.   

As an integral element of her PhD research, and coinciding with Bath’s Literary Festival 27th February – 7th March 2010, the artist Ellen Bell is producing a series of book and text-based drawings and installations exploring the use of emotional language within close relationships. These works will be exhibited at the Chapel Row Gallery in Bath from March 5-10 2010.

The exhibition ‘Talk to Me’ is designed to trigger responses from visitors through their engagement with a series of found objects, photographs and books that Bell meticulously ‘cuts into’ and ‘re-makes’ to create physical metaphors of fictional conversations between lovers. For the construction of her drawings Bell uses text from well-known literary pieces, that involve dialogues between couples, within templates from equally well-known images of couples, these words are ‘re-written’ to create an intriguing juxtaposition. The artist is particularly interested in whether encountering these artworks influences what couples feel about their intimate communication. As part of the project gallery visitors will be invited to complete a short questionnaire. Bell hopes to use these responses in making a dictionary of intimacy.

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