Breathing Exercises

To behold a work by Katrina Bello compels one to hold their breath. Soft graphite gestures on paper trace a journey in nature, as well as a trail through a migrant life. Her works are either gargantuan in scale, vast like a redwood forest or a wide open sea, or a microcosm that fits in the palm.

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Breath

The universe is eternally breathing, in and out.
In a constant expansion, we slowly catch ever-growing views – stars being born, or dying.

Part of her explorations of the natural environment, Bello photographs tree bark, as during residencies in Florida and Wyoming, respectively seen in the works “Terra Magnoliaceae” and “Terra Populus” – both presented as large charcoal and pastel drawings. These close-ups confront you with the complexity of such common things taken for granted, as they slowly document the passage of time. As with all things that eventually come to an end, one drawing – “Terra Magnoliaceae” – approximates a cover of forest fire smoke: a harsh yet poetic end to sentinels that have stood for much longer than we can fathom.

Yet some trees actually grow bark thick enough to survive fires that go up to 700 degrees celsius. While drawing, the artist ponders whether humans can develop such a protection from the ravages of time, or perhaps themselves?

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Concentration

Trips to the West Coast allowed different vantage points of the ocean, and a composite of several photographs is presented in another large work, “Terra Pacifica.” Despite being of overlapped images, it appears as a naturally singular entity. With this evoking the vast waters of the world, one cannot help but take a deep breath, and let it all in. In these works, akin to a moment we exhale, the view expands yet each point of marking remains clear, yet soft. 

The use of graphite, charcoal, and pastel, deposited on the paper as particles, reminds of dust – constantly in the air. It is an element we continually breathe in and out.

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Focus

In the summer of 2019, several forest fires struck the northern rim of the Grand Canyon. As an aid to resolving the situation, remote sensing imagery was used to map the extent and scope of the fires. From an image captured this way, a work, “Immensity (Smoke)” was realized in graphite, occupying an area just within the center of the paper. 

The act of enlarging or reducing an image lends an abstraction to it. As expansive as the Grand Canyon is, this isolated view of one of its specific areas removes it from its original context but allows it to exist in its own finely detailed microcosm – like concentrated ether.

On the other hand, humans—after eventually conquering land—sought other havens beyond oceans. It was a migration defined by uncertainty of destination. Endless days and nights over water leave one prone to images or silhouettes in the mist: visions arising from the immense unknown.

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Centering

As one moves to a new land—an uprooting—one also finds themself holding their breath. 

Having grown up in Mindanao and Luzon in the Philippines, these islands hold position as an anchor to notions of origin. Rendering the two in water-soluble graphite during a residency in Maine produced the pieces “Immensity (Shadow)” and “Immensity (Haze).” It is of interest how the forms that the drawings take physically altered the paper used—grasping, pulling, deforming the sheet as if drawing all attention to its center. Imagined as navels, it is the point from where we are linked to our original source of life, how we first breathed in the womb. In that moment we are cut from the cord; we begin to live, to exist, yet remain connected to our homeland and its memories.

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Mapping out surfaces with calculated strokes, weighted lines, and an ephemerality that extends its subject beyond the edges of the drawings, Katrina Bello continuously explores lands both geographical and within memory: Terra that transcends all boundaries. Within the smallest possible areas, she portrays immensities that hold a universe—all within her continued efforts to understand human life through nature’s quiet messages, and how our humanity begins with our first breath, and ends with our last.