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. Utilizing geometry in ways akin to Sierpinski fractals or crystal structures—wherein larger wholes are made from smaller, repeating components—Fels positions triangles as a framework for mapping the thousands of other people that make up ourselves.

About the Artist

Serra Victoria Bothwell Fels (b. Knoxville, TN) 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, then as a metalsmith at the Appalachian Center for Craft, Bothwell Fels received her MFA from Columbia University. Her work has been presented at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center (WI), Palais de Tokyo (Paris), The Clocktower Gallery (NYC), Pioneer Works (Brooklyn), University of Wisconsin (Oshkosh), BRIC (Brooklyn), Sun Valley Center for the Arts (Ketchum), International Waters (Brooklyn), FLA Gallery (Gainesville), and Smack Mellon (Brooklyn). She is the recipient of a Peter S. Reed Foundation Award, Purchase College’s Windgate Fellowship, a 2019 NYFA Architecture/Environmental Structure/Design Finalist, and a grant recipient from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts.