Thoughts of the thoughtful, Landscape One
A performance piece, developed and performed at Somerset House, 2025
Shanti Bell’s practice has developed to include movement as a central focus, as she investigates how kinetic motion can be introduced into sculpture. Her work explores the immersive, interactive, and wearable qualities of sculpture. Here, we witness a marriage between movement and sculpture, blurring the line between where the body ends and sculpture begins. Framed by the theme of internal architecture, she builds an external mind space for the audience to perceive, question, and experience. At the intersection between object and human emerges something new, a live investigation of how our thoughts grapple with the walls of our brains. Bell delivers these musings in the form of iterations - titled ‘Landscapes’ - that collaborate artist and dancers, through an instinctual and reactive process.
Words often fail to capture the essence of how we think. The abstractness of consciousness is deeply profound and indescribable - our own unique thought patterns are more than merely an internal monologue - it can be white noise, a civilised discussion, a thousand voices overlapping, a soundscape, a series of visual images. It is vague yet sophisticated, mundane yet phenomenal. And it is subject to change at any point.
From the indistinguishable moment our infant brains phased into sentience, we spend every waking day inhabiting a mind and navigating thought. Our environment, interactions, and experiences influence us, moulding and contouring the external, but beneath the surface, we are unconsciously building the home in which our thoughts roam. If the body is a sculpture, the mind is architecture.
Landscape One is a physical embodiment of the act of overthinking and being critical of the self, the constant rumbling beneath the surface that repeats and ruminates. Familiarity does not equal comfort, and frequenting this mind space may feel routine yet distressing. The grinding weight of this cycle is heavy, congested with layers of thought that become a congealed mass. Bodies move within the layers of mesh, moulding and warping inside their frames. In this space, the figure becomes thought within the frame of the structure. Metal and mesh come together to form body and flesh, while movement and human interaction explore how we exist in the confines of the mind. Yet, a space is always an opportunity to fill, and Landscape One can ask how we furnish this room with care and compassion during bouts of criticism.
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Shanti Bell’s practice has developed to include movement as a central focus, as she investigates how kinetic motion can be introduced into sculpture. Her work explores the immersive, interactive, and wearable qualities of sculpture. Here, we witness a marriage between movement and sculpture, blurring the line between where the body ends and sculpture begins. Framed by the theme of internal architecture, she builds an external mind space for the audience to perceive, question, and experience. At the intersection between object and human emerges something new, a live investigation of how our thoughts grapple with the walls of our brains. Bell delivers these musings in the form of iterations - titled ‘Landscapes’ - that collaborate artist and dancers, through an instinctual and reactive process.
Words often fail to capture the essence of how we think. The abstractness of consciousness is deeply profound and indescribable - our own unique thought patterns are more than merely an internal monologue - it can be white noise, a civilised discussion, a thousand voices overlapping, a soundscape, a series of visual images. It is vague yet sophisticated, mundane yet phenomenal. And it is subject to change at any point.
From the indistinguishable moment our infant brains phased into sentience, we spend every waking day inhabiting a mind and navigating thought. Our environment, interactions, and experiences influence us, moulding and contouring the external, but beneath the surface, we are unconsciously building the home in which our thoughts roam. If the body is a sculpture, the mind is architecture.
Landscape One is a physical embodiment of the act of overthinking and being critical of the self, the constant rumbling beneath the surface that repeats and ruminates. Familiarity does not equal comfort, and frequenting this mind space may feel routine yet distressing. The grinding weight of this cycle is heavy, congested with layers of thought that become a congealed mass. Bodies move within the layers of mesh, moulding and warping inside their frames. In this space, the figure becomes thought within the frame of the structure. Metal and mesh come together to form body and flesh, while movement and human interaction explore how we exist in the confines of the mind. Yet, a space is always an opportunity to fill, and Landscape One can ask how we furnish this room with care and compassion during bouts of criticism.
.
The completion of this project wouldn’t have been possible without the incredible team of collaborators to bring it to life.
Creative Director and Maker
Shanti Bell
Dancers & Movement Collaborators
Bea Bidault
Izzy Doick
Hannah Joseph
Sound Artist
IRIS
Lead Production Assistant
Rooya Rasheed
Production Assistant
Suhas Kambhampati
Performance Photographer
Lucas
Movement Direction Collaborator
Ayanna Birch
Rehearsal Film, Videographer and Editor
Suhas Kambhampati
Creative Film, Film Director & DoP
Buster Grey-Jun Writer
Writer
Saffron Cann