I’m Bella Bacon, a London based artist, and my practice centres around the human experience of connection; with self, others and the natural world. Intrigued by relationships, I currently consider the love and empathy that can be felt (or not felt) when close to another. While thinking conceptually of this ‘closeness’, I depict it through physical scenes: bodily intimacy between two figures or cropped portraits, that make the viewer themselves feel close to the subject, and zoomed in moments of landscapes that surround the figures and faces. I work from vintage photographs from the community archive Fortepan, combined with personal reference images.

My own feelings appear in my paintings and shed light on my introspections and experiences of touch, connection and time spent in the natural world. Familiar faces, unintentional sexuality and ambiguous relationships appear unconsciously and the intended love shows itself to be complicated. During my year out studying creative computing, I was reminded that touch cannot happen through a screen, the warmth of skin cannot be felt virtually and the sensation of being beside another can only happen in a physical environment. That is why I paint the surrounding landscapes. Painted with similar techniques and colour but different in subject, I choose to emphasise the materials of the landscapes; painting on wood panels that I leave partly exposed, encouraging the viewer to think of the surface they were looking at. I embrace a looser style, leaving brushstrokes visible, deliberately opposing the flatness of digital images. I use a limited palette: currently made up of phthalo blue, white, naples yellow, Indian red and raw umber.