Belle-Pilar Fleming is a printmaker and textile artist currently residing in Athens, Ohio. She was raised in a small town outside of Dayton, Ohio, a city situated at the threshold of the Rust Belt, Appalachia, and the Midwest. She holds a BA in Psychology from Warren Wilson College, and is currently an MFA candidate in Printmaking at Ohio University. Drawing heavily from research practices based in the social sciences, her work focuses primarily on the lived experiences of individuals across a spectrum of identity and place. Utilizing personal narrative, ethnography, and data visualization, she investigates the role of the artists as a community historian and the sociocultural contexts which shape our behavior.
Fleming's current body of work explores the historiography of queer womanhood, and the means through which queer women construct a sense of lineage and individual/communal identity. Utilizing a range of archival materials from the personal to the institutional, as well as textile traditions historically rooted in domesticity, Fleming investigates the archive as a negotiation of affect, visibility, and public vs. private space.