Dr Louise Bell
Profiles

Dr Louise Bell

Associate Lecturer

School of Art, Design and Architecture (Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Business)

Biography

Biography

Louise is an artist-academic based in the South West. 
Her creative practice includes image-making, object-making, writing, walking, and curation. This hybrid methodology attempts to come-to-know the experience of an absent other through empathic encounters with objects, images, and place. Driven by embodiment, experimentation, and feminist examination, she negotiates absences and partial knowing in response to the experience of being ‘in’ place.
Louise was born in Suffolk, studied in Leeds and Falmouth. Her AHRC-funded practice-led PhD at UAL through Falmouth University positions illustration practice as a process-driven act capable of creatively articulating phenomenologist Edith Stein’s philosophy of empathy. With this theoretical framework, her research examines how creative practice can be a methodological means of empathic engagement with people and places of the past.

Qualifications

Practice-led PhD, The granddaughter-illustrator: using Edith Stein's philosophy of empathy as a methodological framework for postmemorial visual practice, Falmouth University (2017 - 2023) 
MA Illustration Authorial Practice, Distinction, Falmouth University (2015-2016) 
Foundation in Art Therapy, BAAT (May 2012) 
BA Fine Art, Leeds Metropolitan University (2008 - 2011) 
BTEC Art and Design, Suffolk New College (2007 - 2008) 
Teaching

Teaching

Teaching interests

Louise teaches across a number of courses:
ADA Foundation
BA Illustration
MA Illustration
MA Communication Design
MDes Design
Teaching interests include:
  • visual analysis
  • semiotics
  • contextual studies
  • creative critical analysis
  • authorial illustration
  • postmemory
  • walking practice
  • empathic methodology
  • creative cartography
  • slow looking
  • ekphrasis
Research

Research

Research interests

  • empathy
  • postmemory
  • trauma studies
  • walking practices
  • phenomenology
  • intersectionality
  • deconstruction
  • gender studies
  • landscape
  • liminality
  • affect

Grants & contracts

  • 3D3 doctoral studentship funded by AHRC (2017 - 2021)
  • FSA Award for Outstanding Curation, Sophronia (2016)

Creative practice & artistic projects

  • An attempt at revealing a place through walking Solo show, Devonport Guildhall (March 2019) 
  • An attempt at revealing a place through walking Residency, Old Bank Studios, Penryn (August 2018) 
  • FOMO - Falmouth Art Publishing Fair (September 2017) 
  • Shaping the View: Understanding Landscape through Illustration Hereford College of Arts (April-May 2017) 
  •  Benzie Gallery, Manchester School of Art (January 2017) Edinburgh College of Art (November 2016)
  • Sophronia - Falmouth University (August 2016)
  • Diss Corn Hall annual exhibition - Norfolk (2014)
  • Secret Postcard Exhibition - Pedestrian Gallery, Leicester (2012) Lazy Lounge Wine Bar - Leeds (2012-13)
  • CAGD Arts Festival - Leeds Metropolitan University (2011) FLASH! - Leeds (2011)
  • Crumplezone - Leeds (2010)
  • Hamburger Berliner - Leeds (2010)
  • Uncanny Resonances - Leeds (2010)
Personal

Personal

Reports & invited lectures

  • The Damage That Decorates, Anglia Ruskin University (November 2018) 
  • Translating Fragments, Falmouth University (March 2019) 
  • Mind the Gap: the Behaviour of Holes in a Complex Text, Falmouth University (June 2018) 
  • Archives, Walking and the Act of Repair: Exploring Plymouth through Past and Present, Cardiff University (May 2018)
  • Archives, Walking and the Act of Repair: Exploring Plymouth through Past and Present, Université de Lorraine (November 2017)
  • Repair as Illustration: Mapping Plymouth with Kintsugi Principles poster presentation, Falmouth University (January 2018) 
  • Walking as Storytelling: Recovering Narrative from Landscape Falmouth Art Publishing Fair (September 2017) 
  • Finding Meaning in Fog: the Liminal Experience Represented, Edinburgh College of Art (November 2016)
  • Repair: Authorship and Assimilation of Aura Falmouth University (March 2016)

Other academic activities

  • The Damage That Decorates, Journal of Illustration, volume 6 issue 1 (July 2019)
  • Repair as Illustration: Mapping Plymouth with Kintsugi Principle, Falmouth University (January 2018) 
  • Walking as Storytelling: Recovering Narrative from Landscape (September 2017)
  • Finding Meaning in Fog: the Liminal Experience Represented, Journal of Illustration, volume 5 issue 1 (April 2018)
  • Repair: a Study of Deconstructive Illustration Falmouth University (July 2016)
  • History, Memory and Subjectivity in Contemporary Art Leeds Metropolitan University (2011)