Bella Bailey

Bella Bailey is a transdisciplinary artist from Akron, Ohio, where she studied painting and metal smithing at the University of Akron before moving to Baltimore, MD to pursue her MFA at the Maryland Institute College of Art. Her work displays found objects and nested systems as a way of reckoning with the cyclical and emergent behavior of the universe. She orchestrates specific circumstances that return information, which then become base components in another specific circumstance, mirroring emergent behavior and giving a visual language to the forces of nature. Some examples of these emergent techniques include applying heat to thermal paper to create micropatterned cell substrates, mixing highly saturated chemical fluids on wood or paper to crystallize, and displacing soil to produce unique microecologies. When combined with the found object, she analyzes human behavior through its peripheral and ecological residue.