Serra Victoria Bothwell Fels is an Australian-American, Brooklyn-based artist who creates large-scale architectural responses to fantastical blueprints that abstract and compress representations of family systems. Her work employs geometry in ways akin to Sierpinski fractals or crystal structures—wherein larger wholes are made from smaller, repeating components—positioning triangles as a framework for mapping the thousands of people that constitute ourselves.
Bothwell Fels works in site-responsive sculptural installations embedded into pre-existing architectural contexts. These sculptural interventions and outcroppings transform mundane architectural features into sites of imaginative disruption, unexpectedly shifting one's sense of reality and revealing the significant role our environment plays in our perceptions of being. Initially trained as a social psychologist at Stanford University and later as a metalsmith at the Appalachian Center for Craft, she received her MFA from Columbia University. Her work has been presented at major institutions including Palais de Tokyo (Paris), John Michael Kohler Arts Center (Wisconsin), and BRIC (Brooklyn). She is a recipient of a Peter S. Reed Foundation Award, Purchase College's Windgate Fellowship, and a 2019 NYFA Architecture/Environmental Structure/Design Finalist.
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