Veronica Bello
Soft Eye of the Hurricane
Soft Eye of the Hurricane is a ribbed knitted light fixture installation constructed from cotton and monofilament, measuring 1.5 by 5 feet. The work takes its form from the eye of a hurricane: that still, luminous center that exists inside one of nature's most destructive forces. Bello began developing this piece from the experience of evacuating South Florida in 2017 during Hurricane Irma, holding onto the strange contradiction at the heart of that event, that something capable of such devastation could contain, at its core, something so quiet and serene.
The piece suspends that paradox in textile. Light filters through the open knit structure, casting the same kind of diffuse, hovering glow one might imagine at the center of a storm. The use of monofilament gives the work an almost-transparency, a material instability that resists solidity even as the form holds. In Soft Eye of the Hurricane, calm is not the absence of violence. It is what lives inside it.