Bella Feldman's interest in the "vocabulary of shape" as well as the scale and mass inherent in working with heavy metal, makes for pieces that have been described as enigmatic and multifaceted, which is a good place to begin the job of describing her thirty-year body of work. Work that distills a cultural impulse preoccupied with weaponry and technology in collections like War Toys, with its "small, mobile works of glass and metal that look delicate, even exquisite," yet that by her own admission, convey a knack for intimidation, to the tightly muscled subtle aggressions in Cable Organic, with its good tools gone somehow terribly wrong sunniness, all the way back to the filament-like delicacy and grace of the rose thorn and fiberglass resin structures in Membrane Sequence or Cadmus Cadre from the late '70's.
Bella is in the business of producing three-dimensional topographical maps that allow us to get a sense of where we've been and where we're going, from a sharp-eyed, caring feminist perspective that is completely aware that the "difference between beauty and pretty," as Bella says, "is that beauty has an edge to it."
