Bella La Spina

Bella La Spina is a Sydney-based printmaker who works across a wide range of mediums including etching, screen printing and relief. She expands on her fascination with personal and collective memories of Australian life, as well as the institution of archiving, through her contemporary art practice.She experiments with glitch and distortion through a range of different paper and image manipulation techniques including weaving, cutting and collaging. By combining analogue photographic imagery and copper plate etching, La Spina works to piece together a visual narrative that is relatable and evocative of childhood.

These works are an exploration of personal and shared histories in which we preserve within archival institutions. Archival photos are a popular method of documenting history through the form of visual story-telling, which tells the viewer something about the identity of a town or community. What makes us decide what is worth keeping and what to discard? Humans obsession with collecting - acquiring items that say something about its owner - seems to follow no guide. Rural museums seem to be immensely committed to keeping the past alive. Coffs Harbour is a great example of this, as a small east coast town, they have a rich history of continuing a legacy of community engagement and tourism which is largely grounded in their strong industry of banana harvesting. Although archives can be fantastic windows into the past, they can also obscure or erase aspects of history that do not favour the desired narrative.

Using the process of etching to subject each archival remnant to a slow extractive process – it has allowed for new knowledge to emerge through error, slippage, repetition and control. The heat press etching process itself turns the photographic image into a bitmapped assemblage – one that immerses its trace into the metal matrix substrate to allow for new reflections of what existed before.