Janet Bellotto

Water lies as a pervasive essential in Janet Bellotto’s practice, encompassing sculpture, installation, photography, video, and performance, examining the ever-changing world through which she travels. Water flows persistently through her work; oceans and waves, submersion and reflection, fluid thresholds and aqueous states. As both metaphor and material, water operates as a language for transformation, impermanence, and the unstable conditions of contemporary life.

Inspired by narratives and locations, the metaphor of water is omnipresent in Bellotto’s work, operating as a reflection on submersion, memory, and perception. Her practice is grounded in an extended process of research and analysis, generating a dynamic tension between the real and the unreal, the documented and the imagined. Through this sustained inquiry, Bellotto creates spaces of flux where facts dissolve into speculation and history merges with myth.

Bellotto weaves an intricate net between lived experience and water, exploring the layered stories and events that shape both personal and collective histories. In works such as Sable Island, she examines the accumulation of deaths and shipwrecks surrounding the remote Atlantic island, while A Deeper Thunder traces the turbulent and submerged narratives of the Xochimilco canals in Mexico. Across these projects, water becomes a carrier of memory and loss; a shifting archive through which hidden histories resurface and resonate.

Janet Bellotto (1973, Toronto) graduated from the Sculpture/Installation program at OCAD University in 1997, and received her Master of Fine Arts degree from Concordia University in 2001. She is teaching as a Professor in the College of Arts and Creative Enterprises at Zayed University, UAE. Her practice also extends to curating and writing. Bellotto has initiated various artist collectives based on producing site-specific work or using spaces outside of gallery walls and creating cultural art exchanges.