“I am drawn to the unreal, unimaginable, the weird and eerie, and provocative ideas that emerge from experimental investigations and other possible worlds, to describe these tensions.”
Working across sculpture, assemblage, installation, sound, and embodied research, Betty Russ’s practice refers to science fiction, hauntology, spirituality, the-weird-and-the-eerie.
A Leakage of Wholes is an installation of living matter constructed with industrial and found materials, and embodies pop cult interrogations in and around the current global crisis.
Lismore-based Betty Russ is the first artist selected to receive support through the Firstdraft × Metro Arts Program, a two-year reciprocal partnership creating investment in the production and presentation of new work by artists from regional NSW and QLD. After Betty Russ’s premiere at Metro Arts the work will then be presented at Firstdraft in February 2023. In 2023, a project by a regional Queensland artist will be presented at both Metro and Firstdraft.
Betty Russ is an artist and arts worker living on Bundjalung country / Lismore.
Working across sculpture, assemblage, installation, sound, and embodied research, her practice ferments between and around the philosophies and renderings of eschatological terror, speculative +/ science fiction, hauntology, spirituality, the-weird-and-the-eerie. Material manifestations protrude from hypnagogic subconscious fantasy, searching for psychological mitigation to the abject shock of the past, and sweaty white-knuckled fear of the future.