"The most recent additions to my series come from research into astronomy and narratives on how matter from space led to the formation of Earth."

KATRINA BELLO - HAWAK/HOLD (KAI) VIDEO (TO BE PLAYED ON LOOP), DIMENSIONS VARIABLE 2019.

This is the seventh volume of the Working On Gallery Guest Editor Series. Luisa A. Igloria interviewed Katrina Bello, who is a visual artist from the Philippines. This interview transcends my memories, which is deeply associated with my theme, "Trans. Sensory".

First, I want you to click on the above two-hand video.

What connects with your insights?

When I was nineteen years old, I was in Mandaue City, Cebu to study a leprosy community and child education with nursing students from the University of San Carlos. There, my team from the Nanzan Junior College shared Japanese children's stories every day. One of them was a story by Awa Naoko (安房直子, 1943-1993) who was a well-known writer of fairy tales in Japan. 

Her pieces, The Fox's Window and Other Stories, were translated by Toshiya Kamei. The University of New Orleans Press published the book, but I am not sure that the book is still available now.  However, you may like reading While the beans are cooking (translated by Kamei) in Kyoto Journal.

The Fox's Window was a story about a man who walked into the deepest forest and met a fox that died the man's index finger and thumb indigo. When he made a window with his four fingers, he could see memories, including his lost mother. He lost this ability when he accidentally washed his hands when he returned home.

Katrina Bello's video brought me back to things I forgot - - Awa's fox story, Pilipino children who made finger-windows together with their small hands pulled me into the excitement of life.

"Hawak/Hold (Teresa) 2020, Hawak is an ongoing series of animation and sculpture that has a drawing series component." - Katrina Bello

*All photographs are from Katrina Bello's website.

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Artist Interview
​KATRINA BELLO

Introduction
​by Luisa A. Igloria

Visual artist Katrina Bello works in Montclair, NJ and in the Philippines where she was born and raised. Her work has been exhibited in solo and group shows in both the United States and the Philippines.

Bello has received fellowships and residencies at the Tides Institute & Museum of Art, ME; Art & History Museums - Maitland, FL; and Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts, WY. She was a 2021 Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation Creative Fellow for the October 2021 residency at Millay Arts. Katrina received a BFA from the Mason Gross School of The Arts at Rutgers University and an MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art.

"Begun in 2016, Rockscape is a drawing installation that is based on my memories of a landscape in the southern Philippines where I was born and raised. The installation can be scaled into different width and dimensions." - Katrina Bello

Rocks, trees, grasses, bark, and water are some of the images that form the vocabulary of her work. Katrina began drawing and painting as a very young child in Davao City where she was born and raised. When she was eleven, she began exploring charcoal as an art medium, using coconut shells and driftwood from black sand beaches near her home.

​Of late, she has also been experimenting with video and installations “to bring into focus nature’s otherness and sameness with the human world.” Bello founded and directs North Willow, an artist-run attic space in Montclair, NJ. It is an artist-run attic space dedicated to the idea of skill-sharing between visual artists toward the production of work.

"Begun in 2016, Bato Bato Bato is a series of drawings and paintings that is based on my memories of a landscape in the southern Philippines where I was born and raised." - Katrina Bello

Coming across her work, I was instantly mesmerized by her large-scale rendition of natural images and landscapes, and her use of powdered charcoal and pastels (which I learned she applies with her hands onto wall-size surfaces). Smudged lines, intricate cross-hatching and detailing endow the surfaces of her drawings with texture and movement. The resulting works exude both simplicity and depth of scale, intimacy and complexity, as well as profound serenity and a rich wildness.

I asked Katrina seven questions, which I invited her to treat as starting points or touchstones to any way she would like to respond in relation to her work. I also encouraged her to feel free to be anecdotal, and to sound like herself instead of responding from a third person-ish perspective.

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"Katrina Bello: Knowable Earth" Visual Arts Center of NJ

Interview by ​Luisa A. Igloria:

Can you describe your most recent projects and what sparked your interest regarding these?

Katrina Bello: ​My drawing and video works are all ongoing series that I began many years ago. The series are all visualizations of my reflections and several journeys to understand the interrelated subjects of land, landscape, our complex relationship with the natural world, memory, my family, and my experience of immigration. Because I’ve been working on these series for a long time, they’ve gone through changes as they get informed by events, ideas and encounters that come into my life as the years progress.

My interest in these subjects stems primarily from the desire to visualize, or even create, a landscape to make up for the one that I immigrated from when I came to the United States. Sometimes I also see my work as something of a cross between such recreation and an alternative proposition of a remembered landscape that no longer exists except in my memory of it.
​
The most recent additions to my series come from research into astronomy and narratives on how matter from space led to the formation of Earth.

Katrina Bello: "Tender Sun" Works created while at residency at Tusen Takk Foundation, December 21, 2023 - February 25, 2024. Commongrounds, 2nd Fl 414 East Eighth Street Traverse City, MI

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Do you think there has been any significant change or turn in the direction of your work, and what has influenced that? And has living through this pandemic also affected you and your work?

Katrina Bello: ​The pandemic has very much affected my work in some significant ways. Even though the early part of the pandemic restricted my access to travel that I greatly count on to do my work, the restriction led me to find other resources to inform the work, which turned out to be a happy and rich discovery, and it has been part of my work ever since. This is how I came upon astronomy as the most recent resource in my work. I would not have been quite as receptive to new sources such as this because I’m typically stubborn about working with what I already have.

The pandemic was such a life changer, and I’m sure not just for me but everyone else too. Living during the pandemic taught me to be so much more flexible, open, receptive, and humble when it comes to change, time, and space. For a while I had this assumption that simultaneously being an artist and a mother, wife, immigrant, and even student at some point—would develop in me the qualities of openness, patience, and flexibility, and prepare me for the cyclone of changes that the pandemic brought upon us.

But what the pandemic revealed to me was that I was rigid, uncompromising, and protective of certain ideas, attitudes, and modes of working, and especially protective of my studio time. As challenging as it was to change and be open to new things, I’m now grateful for it.

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Can you talk about your typical process for working, especially on a large-scale piece?

​Katrina Bello: It’s only recently that I started working on large-scale drawings on paper. But if childhood is counted, I should really say that it’s only recently that I “returned” to working on large-scale drawings. (Katrina expands on this childhood connection in the next question.)

As for my typical process— the drawings are done on the wall to which I attach my paper. The process involves a lot of rubbing, pressing, and even pushing my hands onto the surface of the paper. It’s because the soft pastels and charcoal medium that I work with are typically crushed and mixed into a loose powder, and the only way that they can adhere to the paper is by rubbing and pressing, sometimes doing it very hard and using my body to make sure the pigments adhere to the paper. Because of the amount of detail of the drawings and the size of the surface to work on, it takes a long time to complete a single work. It takes me between 2-6 months to complete one that measures 5 by 8 feet.

One of my first large drawings in 2016 took almost 9 months to complete. The drawings also tend to appear light, and that’s because there’s very minimal pigment on them. Because of the length of time needed to execute the works, sometimes when I am asked what my medium is, my response would be time.

"Katrina Bello: Knowable Earth" Visual Arts Center of NJ

Before I start on the drawings, the research and resources that inform them begin with me exploring the landscapes of my drawings through hiking, photo and video shoots, travel, and residencies. All in all, the process is a combination of the mental and the physical. But I guess I can also add that it’s a spiritual and emotional one. The process involves so much awareness and sensitivity to not just my own life experiences and feelings, but also of the things that are happening in our society and the world around us. I think that personal or societal tragedies like pandemics and wars are felt deeply by artists; these manifest or are in some way embedded in the work. I know it is present in my own work because every circumstance I feel and think about is surely carried by my body; somehow, this is also transferred to my hands as I press and push my pigments onto the paper.

I recall this one large drawing about water that took me 6 months to complete. I started it before the pandemic and completed it before there was a vaccine available for everyone. Among the thousands on soft pastel marks and lines that I put on that drawing, some must have been heavy, desperate marks—the imprints from days of my worry and agitation from early 2020, and marks I made when family members and friends got sick or passed away. They are there among the marks I made with more consciousness of the subject I intended for the work. I titled this drawing “30,000 Tons.” The title actually refers to the volume of water that falls into Earth annually in the form of cometary particles from space (Earth: A Very Short Introduction, Martin Redfern). But the title also felt apt because of the psychic and physical weight that’s embedded in its making.

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Is there anything you learned in your childhood (not necessarily about art) that you've found has a strong connection to your themes and creative vision at present?

Katrina Bello: I grew up in Davao City, a city situated in the vicinity of an extinct volcano which is also the Philippines’ highest peak, and very near a beach with black sand. My childhood was spent with much play and exposure to the natural surroundings, the tropical flora and fauna there, and the various land and water terrains. For me and my siblings, nature was our playground. As a child I was already drawing, and so drawing and nature exploration were activities I intensely explored. In fact, they were activities that I preferred to playing with other children. But the subjects of my drawings then were religious scenes, and likely influenced by the many illustrated religious and art books that my grandmother collected and shared with us. Although she was not an artist, she was a devout Catholic, a great appreciator of culture; and she loved the religious art and iconography she saw during her visits to Europe.

Perhaps for me, living as we did already so deeply immersed in physically exploring, inhabiting and collecting things in the natural world, I didn’t feel compelled to make any drawings based on nature. But the religious scenes that I drew, I drew them in large scale— they were larger than my body, in an expressive naturalism— on the concrete perimeter walls that bounded our house. Charcoal was what I used to draw with, called “uling” in Tagalog. I would take some from our outdoor kitchen.

​When I became a teenager, our family moved from Davao to Manila, and not long after that, my mother and I immigrated to the United States. The immigration was unplanned and sudden, and therefore, the sense of displacement had me experiencing mixed feelings of excitement, anxiety, and fear. Living in the United States, it took some years before I started making art again. And when I did, I painted. I barely made drawings.

When I finally started taking up drawing again, almost 2 decades had passed. Interestingly, it was a return to the process of drawing that I did back in my childhood home, when I was about 10 years old—which was to draw large-scale charcoal works (this time I also added soft pastels). Although my current subjects are not religious in nature, the feelings of wonder and awe that I have for my current subjects (nature and landscapes) somehow echo the sense of wonder and awe that I had for the religious stories I tried to capture when I was a child.

I think nostalgia plays a big role in my insistence on my current subjects in drawing. After many years of living in urban environments in the United States and not being able to travel back home to Davao for many years, I must’ve developed a longing to visualize and recreate those environments. During this process of studying and getting to know my subjects, I also became aware of the many environmental issues that we are dealing with and developed a stance towards care and concern for the natural world.

"Katrina Bello’s exquisite drawings of the vast and the miniscule in nature" By The Asian American Writers’ Workshop

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Why do you love working in the medium that you do?

Katrina Bello: ​Perhaps one of the reasons for my love of and insistence on my medium also stems from my childhood experience. When I am drawing large-scale with charcoal, I am connected to the same freedom and endless possibilities that I felt when I was a child drawing on the walls outside our home. Using loose crushed pigments that I apply against the paper directly with my fingers and the palms of my hands also has a physical quality that feels appropriate for my subjects. The process of pressing and pushing pigments against the paper on the wall is like pressing on, urging, stressing or insisting on the subject of the work, especially the urgency of the subjects.

The choice of paper as the support for my medium also seems just as appropriate. It’s simultaneously strong and fragile and is pliant and flexible: qualities that my subjects also possess. Also, there is something I find very moving in the contradictory ideas of making a very detailed large-scale drawing requiring 2-6 months of time and devotion, on a support that can be so fragile that a few drops of water can ruin its surface.

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What do you hope for viewers to experience in your work?

​Katrina Bello: ​It is my hope that viewers will have the same feelings of awe, wonder and care that I also have for the subjects of my works. I would also want viewers to feel a sense of calm, which is a recent quality that I hope the works will convey. In one of my recent shows, I felt satisfied and joyful to hear that viewers were feeling a sense of calm in the presence of the works. I also heard that a visitor even asked if the exhibition space in that show would permit a meditation session to be hosted there, because they were feeling a great sense of calm.

The sense of calm was not what I initially had in mind as a response that I desired the works to give. Even in making of the works, sometimes I feel underlying narratives that suggest chaos and conflict, since these are present in nature and the environment: death, destruction, pollution, collapse. Despite these negative aspects, I’m touched to hear that the overall effect is that of calm, and for that I am grateful.

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What's up ahead/what excites you in terms of your work?

​Katrina Bello: ​There are 2 solo exhibitions that I am currently preparing for this year, and I’m looking forward to those. But I am also excited by a new series of works that I just started. I am currently in a wonderful artist residency called Tusen Takk Foundation in Northwest Michigan, and this new series of drawings is inspired by Lake Michigan and the stones I am seeing on its shores. At the same time that I was doing research on the geologic activity that resulted in the formation of this great body of water, I was simply struck by the volatility of the lake waters: how they can rapidly change from a state of calm to one of ferociousness and back again; and also the beauty of the colors of stones as they’ve been rounded and polished by the waters for probably missions of years. The highlight of this new series is color, which I don’t use a lot of. Therefore, I’m quite excited about it.

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Interviewer, Luisa A. Igloria:
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Luisa A. Igloria is the author of Caulbearer (Immigrant Writing Series Prize, Black Lawrence Press; forthcoming 2024), Maps for Migrants and Ghosts (Co-Winner, 2019 Crab Orchard Open Poetry Prize), The Buddha Wonders if She is Having a Mid-Life Crisis (2018), 12 other books, and 4 chapbooks. She is lead editor of Dear Human at the Edge of Time: Poems on Climate Change in the U.S. (co-edited with Aileen Cassinetto and Jeremy S. Hoffman; Paloma Press, 2023), offered as a companion to the Fifth National Climate Assessment (NCA5). Originally from Baguio City, Philippines, she makes her home in Norfolk, VA where she is the Louis I. Jaffe and University Professor of English and Creative Writing at Old Dominion University’s MFA Creative Writing Program. Luisa is the 20th Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia (2020-22), Emerita. During her term, the Academy of American Poets awarded her a 2021 Poet Laureate Fellowship.
Website:  www.luisaigloria.com

Luisa A. Igloria

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Working On Gallery​ Past Guest Editors:
​
Luisa A. Igloria

• "Strange Plants" - Heather Beardsley
  

Meg Reynolds

• "MR: Who are you making this for? mmp: Black femme survivors, including myself."
• ​"Writing and Unwriting: The Asemic Work of Karla Van Vliet"

​​​Francesca Preston

• “I feel like my legs have been cut off": Sculptor and Painter - Lauren Ari

Lúcia Leão

• INFINITE DEMAND: Brazilian Artist - Marcelo Sahea
• "Almost a Poem": Brazilian Artist - Angela Quinto

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