Scribble Room

Bella Bowman

Scribble Room is a room plastered from floor to ceiling in paper adorned in Bella’s Sharpie marker scribbles. She works towards creating immersive installation experiences as, “I want to bring viewers into the visual space my mind manifests into artworks.” Her interest in the changing relationship between spirituality and contemporary art relates to this project in its emotional and obsessive nature. This room is a physical representation of a state of mind she inhabited during a dark period of her life. To be creating this in the present is proof of her personal transcendence out of this state of mind. “In 2021 both my hands were disabled for a year and in my mind one of my biggest problems was that I could no longer create art anymore. Scribbles were all I could do with my hands and a pen. My desire to draw when I knew I could not at the time evolved into an obsession and eventually depression. Later, I realized I placed happiness in how much I could create, I found my worth being mostly external was my real biggest problem.”

The process of making this now made room for release and reflection on that chapter of her life. It represents the mental place of angst she was in at that time. Viewers can relate to this personal experience through the experience of this place. Being in this room is fully immersive, noisey, stimulating, confining, isolating, confusing.

About the Artist

Bella Bowman’s doodles are bold, simple, and complex. She began freestyle doodling in late 2018 on corners of homework paper and has been constantly evolving her style since. She feels so spiritually and physically connected to her doodles that she’s personified their existence as if they were her ‘best buds’. From metal sculpture to textile, painting to installation, Bella’s art is multi-faceted in meaning and medium. She is a self taught painter, photographer, graphic artist, filmmaker, and serigrapher. For inspiration, Bowman taps into a universal human tendency called face pareidolia, seeing familiar objects and faces in random objects and patterns, and applies it to her art. It takes only a moment to recognize Bella’s hand in design, as her works consistently deal with interconnectedness of bold lines and colors. The beauty in Bella's artwork is in the eyes of the beholder: it's whatever you want it to be.

Additional Documentation