Recent
Oil on linen
2025
For With Tomorrow at Schmick Contemporary
Oil on linen
2025
For With Tomorrow at Schmick Contemporary
Oil on linen
2025
For With Tomorrow at Schmick Contemporary
Oil on canvas
2025
Oil on canvas
2025
Eucalyptus transfer on plywood
2025
For Correspondences at the Blueball Room, Victoria
Eucalyptus transfer on plywood
2025
For Correspondences at the Blueball Room, Victoria
Oil on ply , found table legs, yellow envelope
2024
For Working Tiles at Firstdraft
Oil on canvas, plywood frame
2024
For Working Tiles at Firstdraft
2024
Oil on canvas board, recycled timber, recycled hinges, found nails
2024
For New Skin for Old Song at Tiles Lewisham
Oil on canvas
2025
For Schmick Contemporary Fundraiser
copper plate etching
2024
Led strips, canvas, recycled wood
2024
For Myth and Signification at Barometer Street Gallery
Oil on raw canvas
2024
For Myth and Signification at Barometer Street Gallery
Oil on canvas
2024
For Myth and Signification at Barometer Street Gallery
Oil on canvas
2024
For Myth and Signification at Barometer Street Gallery
2024
Myth and Signification at Barometer Street Gallery
Oil on recycled board
2025
For Tiles Lewisham Fundraiser
Wooden book containing image transferred essay, recycled wood, curtain rod rings, pencil, terracotta box
2024
2024
Oil on canvas
2024
Acrylic on canvas
2025
For Melting all over hot concrete at Slip City Gallery
2024
in collaboration with Chloe Nakatsuru
2023
Installation view
2022
Pencil and acrylic on board
2024
Acrylic on board
2022
Oil on canvas
2024
Oil on canvas
2024
Commissioned by Charles Carrall
Acrylic on Canvas
2024
acrylic on board
2024
Oil on canvas
2024
Acrylic on board
2022
Acrylic on board and cement
2022
Led strips, canvas, recycled wood
2024
For Myth and Signification at Barometer Street Gallery
Oil on canvas
2024
Acrylic on baord, beeswax
2021
Acrylic on canvas
2024
Oil on canvas
2024
For Myth and Signification at Barometer Street Gallery
acrylic on board
2022
Oil on canvas
2024
Acrylic on Canvas
2024
Acrylic on board
2022
Acrylic on board, plywood supporting shelf
2022
For Tim Olsen Drawing Prize
With Tomorrow
Elisabeth Sulich
Astrid Bell
The decision to represent certain information through painting can be deliberate, but it is often mysterious. Feeling compelled to turn a precious sight into a painting is to attempt to understand it- it is for the same reason that we take photographs, or bookmark a page, so that we may refer back to an image of the world that invokes a thought or a feeling or a memory. To turn something into painting is an invitation for subjectivity, and a turn away from the literal- inventing a new vision. In any depiction there is a certain removal of context and origin, and the infinite potential to forge new paths of seeing, thinking about what we see, and imagining. In the work of these three artists, the act of describing involves the reverse- undoing, removing, withholding, isolating. From this there is an opening up, and a sense of freedom.
Astrid Bell, Pearl Smith and Elisabeth Sulich are a natural grouping. There is something contained in the works of these painters that pertains to the wonder and slipperiness of perception- how the clarity of something is compromised in fading memory, the tentativeness of media over-saturation, vague archives and the subjectivity of history. But perhaps most importantly, the ability of paint to both realise an image and generate an ambiguity. This is achieved in the way that the artists isolate people, objects or scenes from a context, but also in the way in which they obviate and play with material. There is a dreamlike and other-worldly quality to this work - like pictures made by someone who is outside of earth, making curious observations.
With tomorrow is the title of a song by Gene Clark that was then covered by This Mortal Coil.
Text by Clare Wigney
Images by Sarah R. Serfati
Oil on linen
2025
(Centre painting)
Oil on linen
2025
Oil on linen
2025
Myth and Signification
Nic Narapiromkwan Foo
Sydney Jarrett
Harrison Rae
Astrid Bell
“It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories.”
Myths are stories; considered and condensed, with details and perspectives omitted by a mythmaker. The ability of myth as a tool is that it can distort and change what an image or phrase signifies. It erases the complexities of human actions to create worlds without contradiction.
Roland Barthes writes in 'The Robbery of Language' that the crafting of “a world without contradiction” is an undeniable acknowledgement of the undercurrent of oppositional perspectives erased in favour of a singular vision. Boer posits that within myth there are opportunities for using counter-myth as a means to resist the erasure of other perspectives.
Myth and Signification invites four artists to approach myth and counter-myth as building blocks for crafting oppositional worlds, to contest the creation of a world without contradiction and resist the homogenisation of perspectives.
Together these works craft their own world of contradictions through myth and counter-myth. A world resisting the homogenisation of perspectives, the gendering of bodies, and the exploitation of land and labour.
Text by Harrison Rae
Images by Levent Can Kaya
Counter and Carrier
These works were exhibited at Firstdraft as part of Working Tiles, a group show featuring the 2024 studio artists-in-residence at TILES Lewisham.The works explore how objects, bodies, and stories are carried, counted, and held - focusing on symbolic forms that function as vessels. These are things that are more than one thing; things that hold something else.
Counter is both a painting and a table. Two of its legs were salvaged from the street, sanded and inscribed with text; the remaining two are offcuts from the table’s own frame. A yellow envelope rests face down on the painted surface. The title Counter refers variously to resistance, measurement, and support.
Carrier is a painting and a box, with an internal pine frame. The object juts slightly from the wall, hovering between painting, sculpture, and functional form.
Photos by David Suyasa
String Club
was established three years ago, between Kata Szász, David Suyasa and Astrid Bell. The club meets as weekly as they can in a living room, but it could happen in any room of any house. They listen to each other and meander around a dining table laid with instruments, food, and figurines. The music is a little never ending, string club becomes something new in each iteration; support, slowness, lap steels, strings, humming loops, repetitions, fondness, one offs, love and flukes.Making friends
Across its iterations, it has unfolded as vast exploration of friendship—treated here as a curiously underrepresented relation, one suspended in the productive tension between the individual and the communal.
The project was first performed at Fatal Crush, while Becky Heaton plaited my hair. Subsequent versions have been staged at Kudos Live at Cement Fondu and for the Kudos Emerging Writer Award. Each time, the work returns to itself as an essay that bears repeating and revisiting—again and again.
The most recent iteration took place in November 2024 at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, in the form of a lecture and PowerPoint titled Arm’s Length, curated by Sydney Jarrett.
An archive of writings and readings informing this project.
Audio Guides
During an artist workshop with Örn Alexander Ámundason in Iceland, Audio Guides were born. They borrow from the institutional convention of the accessible, informative audio tour used in exhibitions and museums. Investigating the form for its potential and often intimate poetics, humour, and ambiguity.
These works blend writing and improvisation. They reflect an ongoing interest in sound, dialogue, structures of support, and alternative routes to access and interpretation.
So far, I’ve made three Audio Guides, and I’d love to make more, perhaps for you, for something or anything.
- Different Perspectives,
- Audio Guide in collaboration with Markus Lipsøe faciliated by Örn Alexander Ámundason
- Search Party, Curated by Diogo Pinto in collaboration with Markus Lipsøe
- The birth of the moment is never ending, Kata Szász at Prop Gallery
How to find a non missing find
During my three-month residency at the Lunga School, I developed an interest in semaphores—using this nautical language as a proxy for body language, and as a method for intimacy to traverse real or imagined distances.
“They had been sitting close together on the berm but sending clumsy semaphores as if it were the Clyde Valley that divided them. James leaned across the distance and placed a kiss on his lips. It was dry and his teeth scraped Mungo’s bottom lip. They bumped heads.”
I began making semaphore flags from old curtains and learning the semaphore alphabet. In collaboration with Chloe Nakatsuru, I created a film in which I traced large chalk circles into the landscape—onto footpaths, rocks, and grass. We climbed a small mountain, and from its peak, I sent semaphore messages across the fjord.
This footage became the visual source material for a Riso-printed book titled How to Find a Non-Missing Find, inspired by David Horovitz’s How to Shoplift Books. The book and an audio guide were presented in our final exhibition, The Search Party, curated by Diogo Pinto.
https://www.are.na/a-bell/a-non-missing-find