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In Bells’ art we can trace her search for self. The book begins with a fascinating chapter entitled Home The Journey in which Pippa Stein traces the main themes in Deborah Bell’s work. They include: the influence of Max Beckhamnn; gnosticism; the idea of a layered reality and the journey of unraveling the inner truths; a self which is expansive and spiritual in nature; secret threads and revelations; beauty through transformation and exciting the labyrinth of sensation. Immediately, and without further ado. I am hooked.

It is apparent that through her work she conceives of and creates a personal alchemy, in which she is the base metal and her art, the purifying process. In this way she expands, dissolves and distributes herself into her work, blending her experiences and memories with the symbols and stories of other places and times.
In this regard, she tells of a visionary experience where she finds herself traveling through ancient cities, space and galaxies, uncovering layers of ancient memory and lamenting the ubiquitous violence and strife that so characterizes our part of the universe.

This introduces us to the multiple worlds, texts, histories and consciousnesses that inhabit the artist’s canvas and clay. She regards herself as a Gnostic and she has been influenced by the teachings of Ramtha. In gnosticism, knowledge is the central theme, a means, as it were, of returning to the center, where the “divine spark is awakened and integrated to the divine source”.
This knowledge is gleaned through various processes. One of these is the process of “being analogical”, of being in perfect alignment, “as if you are completely reflecting what is coming through, a feeling where everything flows”. This feeling of oneness, or lack thereof, is reflected in her processes and the final objects.

Tense memories and threatening moods filter through the illicit Lovers in a cinema, 1985 and The Rape of Persphone, 1986. This struggle of wills and blind passion transforms into another kind of love in later works such as Point and Counterpoint II, 1991 and The one is but the shadow of the other, 1991.
In these, the couples “stand alongside each other as equals, as mates who no longer seek the pleasures of the flesh in the form of narcissistic gratification. On a joint pilgrimage, they are in a point-counterpoint relationship: connected, yet apart, opposite yet the same.”

The book includes the animations she produced in collaboration with Robert Hodgins and William Kentridge, namely: Hotel (1997), Easing the passing (of the hours) (1992) and Hogarth in Johannesburg, Little Morals and the Ubu 101 series. Hodgins describes this process less as collaboration, than as a mutual agreement “ to do work with a common theme, each pursuing his own way into the theme… a comradely friction that produces unexpected sparks”. He describes how “ Deborah digs into the situation… scrapes her way into her image – ferociously”.

Kentridge remarks on her receptivity, her “active engagement with material and recognition of what emerges from the place, both anticipated and unexpected”. He interprets her working process as “ an ongoing series of invocations to the plate, a sequence of call and response.

Whether the calls are to the unconscious or to ancestral figures, does not seem vital to me. The heart of it is bringing out images, which are both from and beyond the artist. It seem that Deborah is regarded as a giant by giants. She says she contrasts her personal emotional tendencies with their sense of irony, allowing it to rub off somewhat on her process.
Her collaboration with Hodgins and Kentridge have produced some excellent work-indeed, they represent the cream of the crop. On her most powerful works are The crying pots, 1998 and the Un-earthed series, 2001. These pots evoke the wailing grief, which assaulted the artist during TV airings of the Truth and Reconciliation hearings.

The result seems not overtly political, but the product of an intimate experience, a personal response to the stories of those whose families had been destroyed. For Bell, “they became symbolic of the horrors of our history. The crying and the wailing was in many ways cathartic, and in head it grew: it became a large wailing for all the other horrors, the wars in Rwanda, Burundi, Bosnia. The wailing grew and grew until it became mother earth lamenting the history of mankind”.

In their making “the bowl of the pot became a symbol of the earth, the gesture of pain became a cry and a prayer”. The pot is for her, though small, utilitarian and domestic, worthy of monumental rendering, an empowering symbol of womanhood, one that suggests fertility, birth, and nourishment, the blending of different culture and histories. They are sacred vessels of the spirit, linked to death and marriage. For Bell, the figurative midwife, they symbolize the promise of new birth emerging from the marriage of cultures.

For the lucid Achille Membe, the Unearthed figures “ evoke a lot of things…. a multiplicity of universes” which include Bernin art, Egyptian and Babylonian art and the “world of specters”.
These sculptures, moulded from terracotta and bronze, are manifestations of the artist’s quest to “journey home”.

For some quirky reason, the mere word sentinel sends a sentient shiver up my sentient spine to my sentient mind. So, when Pippa Stein refers to Bell’s view that her Sentinels, 2003, are not created “but carved out of what already exists in the block of clay”, something sentient shivers back.

Deborah is dabbling with the magic here. She says she chose to make nine Sentinels (five in terracotta, four in white clay) because nine is one of the mystical numbers. Her sentinels are “our protectors, symbolizing fortitude, constancy and eternal stability”.

Through this I deduce that her reputed intuition or receptivity is one that is guided or structured a precise template of mystical knowledge and symbolism. This evokes a process reminiscent of the way in which tradition and innovation marry in the African art and ritual.

Keywords: Artist, Deborah-Bell, home the journey, Pippa Stein, review, South-African, unearthed figures