Film, edit and text by Alex Schuchmann

I met Bella Ferreira earlier this year while killing time in New York City, waiting for my friend Bear to land. His flight had been delayed by power cuts somewhere in southwest Europe. I already knew I liked Bella's work—actually, I was deeply curious about it. There was something about the meticulous patterns she draws, often on old notebook paper, that gave me a strange, comforting kind of nostalgia. A quiet reverence for structure and softness.

Vera Matias—who’ll be featured here soon as well—had recommended Bella after a brief connection during her time living in the city. So I called Bella and a short while later, she pulled up in Tribeca, and we were off. I mic’d her up, and we drove toward her studio in Ridgewood, sipping Joe’s ice tea and listening to Brazilian music as the city passed by in a warm, humming blur.

Inside her studio, I got a closer look—not just at the work, but at the way Bella moves through her process. She showed me a piece made from strands of her own hair, freshly cut, along with some from her boyfriend. It felt intimate, but not in a loud way. Her work gives voice to those quiet, discarded parts of ourselves—the bits we leave behind on shower tiles, the threads we rarely think to gather.

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Bella often sees herself less as the creator and more as a medium—someone through whom the work emerges, rather than someone who controls it. She builds structures that allow small, mysterious phenomena to arise. A lot of her pieces revolve around counting, repetition, and method. In one series, she sets herself a task: to count every breath during meditation, and each time a thought interrupts the stillness, she makes a brushstroke. It’s a practice of attention and return, of measuring the mind’s fluttering pace through marks on a canvas or paper. Her art lives in that in-between space—between control and surrender, thought and breath, the visible and the nearly forgotten.

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