KAREN McPHAIL-BELL

​Karen McPhail-Bell is a visual artist, with work held in private collections across the U.S.A. and Australia, and featured in publications including the anthology, 'Finding What Always Was', and La Raíz Magazine. Karen also offers signature arts-based coaching workshops to help values-based professionals reimagine their work and life, and make the change they desire for themselves and those they serve. Her art has been exhibited locally and internationally.

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Karen’s work serves as a powerful dialogue between human experience and the natural environment. Her process, a collaborative dance between artist and medium, results in rich, textured surfaces that evoke the complexities of the natural world. Her paintings in Aqua Limina include Still Standing and What are we losing? 

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In What are we losing? Karen thinks about the potential deforestation and dewatering impacts on the area's water table. Dewatering is required to stabilise a quarry’s operations. In doing so, it transforms the very water that sustains the ecosystem into a ‘hazardous’ commodity that must be controlled. Water’s natural flowpaths are disrupted and constrained.

Amidst recent protests about the quarry, She heard leaders say this is ‘the right project, the wrong place’. Whether established here or elsewhere, the quarry would serve our society's hunger for new materials to ‘manage growth’. In this way, the proposed quarry represents the urgent need for our society to break away from over-consumption and the destruction of all that water sustains.

This painting explores the predicament of endless growth in colour: What are we willing to lose to live this way?

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In Still Standing, Karen reflects on her younger years, She spent many happy summers surfing and volunteering as a surf lifesaver on the Gold Coast. These days, She connect with the coastline more gently. She have watched the ocean reshape the coastline daily over time. Yet recent weather changes have eroded the coast vigorously, leaving this lifeguard tower standing tall yet teetering on a newly-formed cliff edge. The sight reminded her how fragile our shorelines and oceans are to the scale of human activity and damage. Her chosen colours in this piece allowed her to both celebrate our local beaches and capture the feeling of seeing them so visibly impacted.
 

Artwork