Little Morals: What Love Can Do, 1990

Little Morals is a portfolio of etchings done in conjunction with Robert Hodgins and William Kentridge.

The series Little Morals (1990) is Deborah Bell’s contribution to her second collaborative project with William Kentridge and Robert Hodgins, the first being Hogarth in Johannesburg (1987). The images in this collaboration were inspired by the etchings and engravings of the eighteenth century Spanish artist Francisco Goya. According to Bell, ‘each image is its own ‘little moral’, the titles of which are based on his etchings, chosen for the poetic resonance between image and word. In A Last Judgement, for example, the shadow play suggests a curate and a lay-figure in debate or judgement of the scene behind them, The Expulsion from the Garden of Eden’.

Pippa Stein (2004) Deborah Bell, Johannesburg: David Krut, page 56.