The Tusen Takk Foundation and the Dennos Museum are pleased to present Sky Into Stone, a solo exhibition by alumni artist-in-residence Katrina Bello featuring charcoal and soft pastel drawings created around the time of her 2023 residency. While Bello’s work has long incorporated history, Earth sciences, migration, and memories of her native Philippines, the residency at Tusen Takk afforded her precious space and time to re-examine former assumptions about land, landscape, and belonging. Amidst the beauty of Northern Michigan’s coastline, Bello’s encounter with such a vast inland sea–described as akin to a “raging ocean whose waves crash against the shore with a rapidity that borders on insanity”–catalyzed the creation of new work in response to time, humanity’s relationship to the natural world, and the divine.
The title of the exhibition is drawn from the book “The Earth: A Very Short Introduction” by Michael Redfern (Oxford University Press, 2003).
Photo above: Katrina Bello at Tusen Takk, 2023. Image courtesy of the Tusen Takk Foundation. Photo by Tom Peckham.
ARTIST BIO
Born in Davao City in the Philippines, Katrina Bello is a visual artist whose work is informed by memory, observations, experiences and narratives of land and natural surroundings during her experience of immigrating to the United States. She has participated in solo and group exhibitions in the United States and the Philippines, and has been awarded fellowships and residencies in the United States. She attended the College of Fine Arts at the University of the Philippines in Diliman, Quezon City, and received a BFA from the Mason Gross School of The Arts at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. She received her MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, Maryland. She currently lives and works in New Jersey in the United States and Metro Manila in the Philippines.
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