Undergraduate Student, Oberlin

Visual Arts

Title of Exhibition: Love letters to the Land

Artist Statement
I love spoons. I love to observe the connections and interactions between people, the land, and other people. I love to see the love in how we feed each other and how we feed the land. Often my practice manifests in the form of literal cooking using physical spoons. Serving, seeing, and eating food is an experience that lives between the senses and connected directly to the land and what we have grown. Through this, we have the ability to see touch smell and taste bits of earth and know through this sensory experience how it is treated. love celebrating these little bits of earth through serving them.

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The food I make and serve exists in moments, however I love to continue the celebration of them long after they pass. It is beautiful how things wilt and change, and it is beautiful how pigments stay just about the same, such that a moment of color can be made to last longer than a memory. Using these stable artifacts of unstable memory, we can capture just a little bit of the beauty. Using bits and pieces of our unstable earth we can represent their larger contexts, their permanence here and impermanence there. It is not a battle between the impermanence of things and the want for permanent art and memory, but a celebration of the juxtaposition.

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Removed from their little moments and love, I create simple objects that represent people and places. However, I love working with my hands, giving myself time to meditate on the beauty of what I am working with. The spoon as a symbol reminds me to notice the nourishment I receive from my surroundings and nourish back. At the core of my practice, I notice and I celebrate.

Should there be food?

Soup and bread.

Nourish and be nourished

For more of Julia’s work:

https://patbellstudio.com/
Instagram: @thedengingerarts

Final Studies are in partnership with The University of Akron and are made possible with support from Fifth Third Bank and the Robert O. and Annamae Orr Family Foundation.