Bella Cagnoli- BA (Hons) Fine Art
Bella Cagnoli is a sculptor and stand-up comedian, who creates absurd works combined with everyday objects to manufacture a punchline. She transforms the objects’ context by allocating them a narrative or character. This offers the viewer a playful space based in a dark humour.
Her sculptures involving kinetics are light-hearted, brightly coloured demonstrations of failures. Involving themes of the weird, the pathetic, the unsettling, desperation and border self deprecation. When doing a comedic performance success and failure is tethered between laughter and fear. Cagnoli’s sculptures sit in the middle of this: between joy and darkness, aspiration and failure, comedy and tragedy. She not only addresses and counters the permacrisis we reside in, but the pressures of success. In attempt to offer a relief for herself and the viewer.
She also was selected for Art School Commissions, in her practice she doesn’t say away from utilising humour to talk about difficult topics. ‘The Get Away Car’ is a recreation of a road trip she went on days after being an eyewitness to a violent crime. Little joyful acts, including laughing and listening to music in a run down car with the windows down, made the fear and paranoia she experienced more manageable. This sculpture reimagines and celebrates these coping mechanisms.
