Vi Bell paints in the opean air and in the quiet of her studio, but also in places a paintbrush rarely goes. She has painted with patients on hospital wards and led a project with children through a national child and youth service. For her, these are not departures from the work. They sit at the centre of it, alongside anything that eventually finds its way onto a gallery wall.
Her studio practice centres on semi-abstract botanical work, built on close study of how landscapes rebuild themselves after damage, and how that same pattern plays out beyond the natural world, in the way people rebuild after their own upheavals. More recently, her practice has expanded to include plein air painting, another form of recovery, this time from a kind of depletion modern life hasn't yet found a name for: the steady erosion of attention by screens and algorithms.
She is currently based in Ireland, with her practice increasingly extending into the UK.