Bella La Spina is a contemporary printmaker practicing on Gadigal and Kuringgai Land. Primarily working with found and archival imagery, her practice expands across the mediums of printmaking, photomedia and sculpture to create assemblages that explore themes of memory, history, erasure and haunting. Bella’s work is predominantly process driven, and utilises the extractive processes of analogue photography and printmaking to strip back and reveal what narratives may be held below the official archive exterior. UV sensitive emulsions and translucent, delicate materials such as silk organza are held in a constant tension against the industrial qualities of hardwood screen printing frames and copper sheets, which has resulted in an alternative archive that confronts the complexities of the archival landscape and touches on themes of spectrality, ephemera and fragmentation, to create a nuanced portrait of place and its history.

Bella graduated from the National Art School in 2023 with an MFA in Printmaking. Her works are held nationally and internationally including in the Arts Law Centre of Australia collection and the National Art School Archive. Her works have been shown in various exhibitions including  SELECTED: a Photography and Printmaking exhibition curated by Andrew Totman at CBD Gallery in Sydney and Disruption: Discourse and Exchange at King Mongkut’s Institute of Technology Ladkrabang in Bangkok, Thailand. With recent funding provided by the Northern Beaches Council, Bella will be undertaking a place-based investigation into the iconic Spit Bridge, Mosman, for the early part of 2024. She will also be exhibiting in her first solo exhibition at Dominik Mersch Gallery in August of 2024.