Jackie Bell is a sculptor whose practice emerges from a rich tapestry of lived experience. Having graduated from Edinburgh College of Art in 2023 as a mature student, Bell swiftly distinguished herself by securing one of the prestigious John Kinross scholarships to Florence. Currently based at Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop, she crafts works that speak to the profound interplay between materiality, memory and time’s passage.
Bell’s artistic preoccupations centre on time, memory, aftermath and decay—themes emerging from what she describes as “that bog land of the buried and discarded.” Her sculptural language is deeply rooted in material exploration, with iron, salt, cloth and clay serving as her primary media. These elements are selected not merely for their physical properties but for their symbolic resonances and mythological associations. Bell’s process-oriented approach embraces the transformative qualities inherent in these materials, allowing them to manifest traces of time whilst enfolding space within compositions that balance tension, equilibrium and stasis.
For Hidden Door’s 2025 Festival Bell presents Rampart: – a reimagining of elements from her previous work, Tenter. This installation explores the paradox of a protective barrier whose very construction — woven and partial — renders it fundamentally unable to fulfil its intended function.
The work takes the form of a commanding curtain constructed from interwoven strips of rich red fabric, suspended by iron hooks from an industrial iron bar. The fabric cascades downward, eventually pooling across the floor, its folds weighted with bags of salt—a material carrying associations of preservation, purification and ancient memory. The installation requires minimum dimensions of ten feet in both height and width, with a depth of six feet when positioned against a wall.
Find out more at jackiebell.co.uk
