Kirsty Bell

Kirsty Bell is a Scottish painter. She graduated from Gray's School of Art in 2023 and recently completed a Fellowship at Belfast School of Art in 2026. She utilises the trompe l’oeil painting technique, disrupting the barrier between the painting and the spectator. Bell’s work strives for proximity but never quite reaches an ultimate conclusion. Working in oil, she seeks to generate elusive, shape-shifting images, blending found components gleaned and gathered from the environment surrounding her, manipulating them to create a nearness to something other.

Gathering and translating images from online and physical sources contributes to the slipperiness Bell cultivates in her work, a visual ambiguity arranged from the shrapnel of the found image. For Bell, painting’s strength lies in its splendid uselessness: a mute surface that neither answers fully nor resolves. It is a doorway to elsewhere, a resting place for doubt, where meaning slips and the unresolved is allowed to breathe.