Patrick Bell

Artist Statement

My father died of cancer when I was in my early twenties. I was present for a lot of it, which means I watched his body change from what I had come to know up to that point. The disease and the system treating it were inseparable, and both felt like they were doing something to him rather than for him. Metastasis 3 came out of that unresolved feeling. The central form references diseased tissue, cracked and mottled, glazed in ways that borrow from pathology slides and wound surfaces simultaneously. I worked with abstracted finger forms a lot during this time almost as a stand in for medical intervention. They are holding the organ like object, but the holding is ambiguous and unresolved. What cancer taught me, and what the medical system compounded, is that the body becomes an object of other people's expertise. You lose authority over your own flesh. This piece tries to sit inside that tension without offering comfort. The cracking glaze is not decorative deterioration; it's something that looks like it is falling apart while being simultaneously, stubbornly held together. The title locates the work in process rather than event. Metastasis is spread, migration, disease finding new ground. I've been doing that too, carrying this for over a decade since his death and finding it surface in the work whether I intend it or not.