Bella Geldart (b.1998) is an interdisciplinary artist living and working in Glasgow. In 2021, she graduated from the Glasgow School of Art with a First-Class Honours Degree in Sculpture and Environmental Art.
Informed by my love-hate relationship with British identity, my work aims to caricature the landscape of contemporary society. I draw upon familiar rituals, traditions and objects associated with British culture, which I isolate in their simplicity and present as iconography. Working between the mediums of sculpture and performance, I dissect the instructional prose of daily life, cultural events, and togetherness; influenced by identities inherited from the environments we live in and borrowed from culture consumed.
I am currently interested in the role sports plays as a theatre of the absurd and a spectre of nationalism, using the legacy of ‘The Olympic Games’ as a structure to investigate ideas surrounding play, applause, win and lose, and patriotism.
Within ‘Rings of Fire’ I use performance to subvert ordinary behaviours and re-contextualise cultural moments, paired with hand-made sculptures that symbolise an event that will happen, is happening, or has happened. Throughout the duration of the exhibition, ‘The Games’ become a snapshot of modernity, contemporary iconography, and an arena of glory for mass consumption.
