Ilana Bellville

Ilana Bellville is an artist based in London and Melbourne Australia.

She has a BA in The History and Philosophy of Science and Art history from Melbourne University and an MFA in Film from Columbia University. She is currently completing her MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art.

Her short films have screened at many international festivals including Sundance and the London Film Festival. 

She is currently working on an essay film about painting as a pharmacopeia exploring pigments and ancient medicinals.

I come to painting with my eyes upended all sympathetic magic passing through my hands to touch the tubes of paint. The process alchemical, mysterious, like a divination. The boundaries between things are evisercated.

Summoning a kind of radical materialism I ask the paint to reveal its own materiality and messages and to help me digest my own explorations into consciousness and a long time illness that has deeply affected my way of seeing and feeling in the world. 

My influences are drawn as much from the occult as from nature and the imaginary. From my experiences in this world and in the worlds which remain both invisible and yet, for me, utterly present to the touch. These works are out of bounds, occupied with the transcendent . Made in delicate times there is a grief sewn inside them bursting into flames.

My hope is that these offerings can be suggest an opportunity for the kind of healing that might have taken place in Asclepius’s dream temples and which is so so needed in our time. As a gesture towards radical visions and sensations for all. Me, you, world, off world.