Bella La Spina
Bella La Spina, Untitled, 2023, overhead projector, acetate, scavenged screen, dimensions variable. NFS.
Bella La Spina, Panning Sand: Unearthing Coffs, 2021-2023, bound book, etchings on Hahnemuhle, 75 x 100 x 5 cm. $2500.
How do we decide what is worthy of keeping and what to discard when it comes to the photographs and documents held in archival institutions such as Coffs Collections? The archive is more than simply a collection of photographic and written records showcasing moments of community engagement and coastal tourism, but a complex system of traces and marks that tell a narrative beyond the official record. By scouring the archive of the NSW mid-north coast town of Coffs Harbour, which is a site of personal and familial history to the artist, themes of spectrality and haunting begin to appear through the ghostly traces and impressions of undocumented histories that are scattered among the pages.
Analogue forms of recording and the temporal mark have become cherished in the age of the digital for their capacity to evoke visions of the past. The traditional printmaking process of etching intensifies the remnant trace, as it allows for error, slippage and image deterioration resulting in an alternative printed archive that constructs a nuanced portrait of place through the concept of visual writing. The traditional bound structure of the book has been expanded in the work Panning Sand: Unearthing Coffs (2021-2023). The book has become a stationary object which encourages the viewer to engage the body when turning the pages, to merge the desire to interact with printed matter, and the human impulse to collect and preserve archival material.
The mesh of no longer usable silk screens holds an archive of its own. The translucent surfaces hold layers of history - the trace of the user’s process and of something that was once legible. The traces of previous use haunt the object similarly to the trace of the archive. The overhead projector, evocative of many childhoods, is a vehicle in which allows the two haunted traces to blend into an illuminated and physically intangible light assemblage.
Bella La Spina is a contemporary printmaker practising on Gadigal and Kuringgai Land. Primarily working with found and archival imagery, her practice expands across the mediums of printmaking, photomedia and sculpture to create assemblages that explore themes of memory, history and identity, erasure and haunting. La Spina’s work is predominantly process driven, and utilises the extractive processes of analogue photography and printmaking to strip back and reveal what narratives may be held underneath the official archive exterior.
La Spina graduated from the National Art School in 2023 with an MFA in Printmaking. Her works are held nationally and internationally including in the Arts Law Centre of Australia collection and the National Art School Archive. Her works have been shown in various exhibitions including SELECTED: a Photography and Printmaking Exhibition curated by Andrew Totman at CBD Gallery in Sydney and Disruption: Discourse and Exchange at King Mongkut’s Institute of Technology Ladkrabang in Bangkok, Thailand. La Spina will be exhibiting in her first solo exhibition at Dominik Mersch Gallery in August of 2024.
