Tuesday, 25 February 2025
Sunday, 17 November 2024
CV
Recent Highlights
2020 - present PhD (by Practice) in Painting and Performance, Manchester School of Art
April 2024 Feckless Gallery x K-House – two-person show, K-House, Manchester
July 2022 Discourses on Motherhood: International Conference, Birkbeck, University of London - paper How does the Cult of Busy Affect Mother Artists?
July 2022 Artists Residency - Spilt Milk Gallery, Edinburgh
May 2022 PAHC Symposium - poster and presentation Making Time
Oct 2021 The Last Cartwheel - Solo Show, Existential House, Liverpool
Selected Employment
Oct 2022 – Sep 2023
University Centre St Helens – Associate lecturer BA (Hons) Fine Art Painting
General teaching duties including lecturing, seminars, tutorials, assessment, feedback; module leadership (L4 Painting and Drawings Modules) with duties including administration, curriculum and assessment design, preparing handbooks, managing course information and communications via the Moodle VLE.
Jan 2012 –Nov 2019
University Centre St Helens - Module leader BA (Hons) Photography
General teaching duties including lecturing, seminars, tutorials, assessment, feedback; module leadership (L4 and L5 Research Methods and Extended Essay) with duties including administration, curriculum and assessment design, preparing handbooks, managing course information and communications via the Moodle VLE. Assisting students with UCAS application, portfolios and writing references.
March 2002 - Present
Freelance workshop co-ordinator/lecturer
Working as a freelance artist/educator at various schools, colleges and galleries. Facilitating workshops in conjunction with exhibitions or within an educational context. Facilitating a wide range of school workshops from short-term indoor displays to permanent outdoor features. Projects have run from a half-day to a programme over a whole term using knowledge of current primary curriculum.
March 2003 – Nov 2003
Raffles La Salle College, Sydney: Lecturer (PT)
Delivering and developing learning opportunities in Figure Drawing and Visual Studies on an Advanced Diploma Course. Maintaining and providing administrative records, including assessment, and taking part in curriculum development and implementation.
Jan 2000 - Jan 2001
Drumcroon Education Arts Centre: Artist-in-Residence
Continuing own practice, education training and workshops with students
aged from 4 + in a variety of
mediums and in a variety of environments (Gallery, school, workshop and
community), organising and running
Life Classes.
Jan 1999-Jan 2000
Manchester Metropolitan University: Lecturer (PT)
Unit Leadership - Giving Individual and Group tutorials on BA Photography. Administration and assessment.
Sep 1999
Liverpool Biennial (Voluntary)
Working with international artists across all areas of exhibition production - including marketing, administration and installation.
Qualifications
September 2020 Start PhD at Manchester Metropolitan University
2017-2018 MRes Art and Design (Distinction) LJMU
2014-2016 MA Fine Art (Merit) LJMU
1989-1992 BA (Hons) Fine Art, Sheffield City Polytechnic
1996-1997 P.G.C.E (Further Education) Art and Design, Bolton University
Dec 2012 Awarded QTLS Status, IFL
Exhibition Highlights
The Last Cartwheel, part of Feckless Gallery x K-House, K-House, Manchester April 2024
“We are all Going to Die” Existential House Aug 22 Single Figures, Projects Gallery, Sheffield Dec 21 Mixed Show, Royal Standard, Liverpool, Jun 2015 Solo Show, Stockport Art Gallery, Feb 2012
“Head On” Red Gate Gallery, London, Mar 2010 Liverpool Biennial, NCC, Sep 2008 UAMO Festival, Munich, Germany, Mar 2007 Shortlisted for Saatchi/Guardian Show, Sep 2006
North Sydney Collective, Sydney, Australia, Oct 2003 Solo Show, Cornerhouse, Manchester, May 2000
Conferences
May 2022 PGR Conference, MMU – presentation of practice and research
June 2021 Time / Space / Paint: A Conversation – Symposium arranged by Liverpool Independents Biennial
April 2018 Body.Method.Time Symposium Tate Liverpool Delivered Paper “Making Time”
Performance
Sep 2023 Scratch Performance Domestic performance with my children
May 2018 Space, Time and Motherhood performance and seminar as part of the TimeTunnel Multi-Media Collaborative Festival, Fabric District, Liverpool.
Feb 2017 Bonneting Arts Council funded collaborative painting performance at Leydon Gallery, Whitechapel
Curation
Nov 2017 - present Feckless Gallery at Make, Liverpool. Building and curating a pop-up space and producing a number of short-term events providing exhibition, curation and performance opportunity for emerging artists.
Collections
Private collections in Europe, USA and Australia
Monday, 14 October 2024
Scratch performance by Amy Russell, DRG and HRG September 2023
Performances are a relatively new part of my practice. I first performed around seven or eight years ago with my collaborative partner Fiona Stirling, and I find making simple performances a useful tool for my practice as a whole and to this research in particular. The ability for research to be developed and made during a performance of one iteration and within time and budget constraints is key. This refers, in some ways, to my early painting practice and the how the use of quick marks and simple print/lettering allowed me a way of communicating quickly and directly. The current version of these constraints is around time and budget and these Scratch performances are determined by the circumstances of their making.
Collaboratively, Fiona and I had worked with our children several times but, due to time and space constraints (and informed by Courtney Kessel’s 2016 performance, In-balance) I wanted to experiment with making performances at home with my own two daughters. They agreed to take part again.
In the Scratch performance I use a bonnet that I've used in a series of collaborative painting actions that, with Fiona, we performed in selected public spaces.
This performance with my children took place in a domestic setting, in the back room of our house.
“You've used the place you spend your most time and you've used the place you work in, where you do your work and where you do your housework. And where you … raise your kids.” (HRG Scratch Performance Discussion 2023)
I cleared the room and placed two stools in the middle of the space, these two stools were borrowed from my mother, because I didn't have anything appropriate.
We enter the space and put our outfits on to delineate the start of the performance. The bonnet gives me a sense of anonymity, but also acts as a way of making me focus because of the way that the sides of the hat cut out a lot visually of what's going on around me – a bit like a horse with blinkers on, the bonnet both visually and physically oppresses. My children are wearing various other disguises also to protect their anonymity. DRG is wearing a balaclava that she made for performance with the Young Everyman Theatre. HRG is wearing a headscarf, and sunglasses.
“I liked as well that we could hide our identity because I feel like I don't know about you. But when before we started it, I was a bit nervous to do the performance because I was a bit like, oh, gosh, I feel like having anonymity makes you more relatable, because it doesn't mean you haven't put certain personality on it and as well, you've not gender you've not put an age, you’ve not put anything else.” (DRG 2023)
This performance starts by us putting on these costumes, On the stools, there are a set of playing cards which have been split. And both children have been given a task. The task itself isn't very important, because it just needs to be an activity for the children to do. My children and I had many discussions on what the activity should be; I had wanted to echo the Time Space and Motherhood action of throwing paint or throwing food echoing a performance by Stephen Sheehan, Finland does not exist (2016), which we were all in the audience for and participants in. Sheehan’s performance involved the audience throwing mushrooms to register their enjoyment or lack of, of the performance. Both physical actions it seemed to me, portrayed the mess and chaos of a domestic environment and where perfect for this piece. The children did not want to do this.
“Yeah, because I felt it. I felt like it was a bit too. Toddler-y…it's very babyish, but also, it's like, that's, it's like us going wah wah wah wah wah And I feel like it's more nuanced than that. It's not just us throwing food … because then that makes us look like t***s” (DRG 2023)
DRG and HRG's agency in this was important both in terms of their inclusion and for me to relinquish some control over the way the piece was pointing in order for this to be a truly collaborative work. While I designed the scratch performance there was a limit to what they were happy to do and things that they wanted to have input into - like what they were wearing and what the action they would be performing would consist of “You wanted us to do this…we have to have a say in how it’s done”. (HRG 2023) They needed to have a task which required concentration, communication (with each other) and focus. They settled on a simple gathering of playing cards in the same suit, and they will be doing this activity whilst I am reading out the abstract for this research project.
This could be any piece of writing about the work as I wanted to produce this initial “scratch” performance so that I can try and understand what it is about this work that needs to be done as a performance rather than any other art form. I could have made a painting; I could have made an installation. Performance seems a straightforward way of exploring issues, exploring ideas. It’s quite concise – I can get the children involved if they only have ten minutes available. I can make work on my own or with a colleague. I can make work in a domestic or public space, my lack of time and space (necessary outcomes of parenthood), need not hinder my impetus to make the works. I can photograph or film the performances, or document them through conversation or writing. Performance brings with it an inherent flexibility and instantaneousness that fits in with my lack of time, space, and funds.
I decided to do a scratch performance as I had heard the term at a local theatre, and I understood it to be the first reading of a play or a way of trying out new material; a way of getting feedback on material and of developing the piece. I felt that it could be similar to a sketch that you might do for a painting, or a way of working out of an idea. As I come from a 2D Visual Art background, this seemed a good way for me to test out the water with this performance.
In Social Works Shannon Jackson discusses, among other things, the relationship between visual art/artists and performance art and the “increasingly complex field of experimentation in art performance” (Jackson, 2011: online) and examines why increasing numbers of visual artist are choosing to work in social practice and performative work. This shift potentially offers artists using performance a greater degree of control over their work. She writes: “Visual artist have begun to refuse the static object conventions of visual art, exploring the durational, embodied, social and extended spatiality of theatrical forms.” (Jackson 2011)
The piece of writing I selected for this performance was the abstract for my research project. I start reading out my piece – the children start their tasks, and what soon became apparent is that it was quite difficult for me to continue to give a clear performance or a clear reading. As part of the children’s activities, they are sometimes required to ask each other for cards to make up their set, they need to communicate with each other. This action relates to a domestic setting where I’m trying to do a task or an activity, and the children are doing their tasks or their activities – replicating my experience of motherhood in the domestic space. What ensued was a performance that I struggled to concentrate on and that didn’t sound very clear, or very natural, as HRG noted in our discussion after the performance.
“The video (of our performance) actually reminds me of… a ransom video? …not as in you were like, scared. But when you’re trying to speak in a ransom video, you’ve got something completely different going on in your mind. And… that’s your life though – trying to work with kids.” (HRG 2023)
Her observation echoes Lisa Baraitsers:
“Though the relation between maternity and interruption has been commented on at a more global level in terms of the ways having children can interrupt a woman’s career or life-plan (Orenstein 2000:33), there has been little attention paid to the psychological effects of being constantly interrupted on a moment-by-moment basis by small children” (Baraitser 2011:67)
And both children discussed how the set-up of the performance (with me stood in-between them) reflected a long-standing element in our relationships:
“I think you had to have separation between the two [of us] as well…you’re standing in the middle, because if your stood on the end …we’ll be bickering. “(DRG)
When I had finished reading my content, the performance was over. We took off our costumes and left the room.
We produced this performance before my children left home, they both left home on the same weekend in September 2023, I felt it was important to make the work whilst they were still at home as I was trying to document the process of them leaving home. When I first started negotiating art and motherhood in my own practice, I looked at Mary Kelly’s important Post-Partum Document (1973-1979) in which she documents, in detail, the first few years of her son's life. This work was ground-breaking and led the way in terms of explorations and documentation of motherhood and consists of, amongst other objects, diary entries, drawings, nappy liners, items of clothing and recorded conversations up until “the crucial moment of the child’s entry into an extra familial process of socialisation, i.e. nursery school” (Kelly 1983). As my children grew, the economic and time issues overtook the physical aspects of child rearing. Now as my children were leaving home and geographically moving away from me, this physical aspect of Kelly’s work became important again. I felt that this performance, in part, could be part of the process of me, documenting my children leaving home in the same way and become in some way a transposition of Post-Partum Document.
After the performance we reflected on what we had done. Some interesting things came to light from not only the performance of the piece but from the discussion with my children where they were invited to discuss their reflections in the same way they had been encouraged to collaborate in the design of the performance beforehand.
“The fact that you've had to do it in your own house with limited resources, the way that you've lent the chairs off your mum … there’s nothing perfect about it ... we're bickering halfway through... that is literally what your project is.” (HRG 2023)
Scratch Performance culminates and draws together all the elements I have been working with: Motherhood, time and activism. It uses collaboration and performance to explore “one way of characterising the “performative turn” in art practice is to foreground its fundamental interest in the nature of sociality”. (Jackson 2011) Scratch Performance marks a more deliberate turn towards performance, both out of necessity (economic and time-related) and a sense of agency; and, in that way, utilises elements of 1:1 scale practice away from more conventional performer/audience practice and into something useful for individual artists limited by resources.
PAHC Symposium - presentation of poster Making Time
May 2022 PAHC Symposium – Collaboration with MA student presentation of poster Making Time
Artists Residency - Spilt Milk Gallery, Edinburgh
July 2022 Artists Residency - Spilt Milk Gallery, Edinburgh
A collaborative residency with Fiona Stirling at Spilt Milk as part of their "A Room of Ones Own" residency programme.
Join us this Saturday at
2pm at our residency space in Edinburgh for an informal end of residency
discussion and sharing session with @fiona_stirling_
& @missruss70
Fiona & Amy are currently undertaking a collaborative residency with Spilt
Milk as part of our 'A Room of One's Own' residency programme. Join them at the
end of their residency period as they reflect on the experience and share what
they have been working on.
Both of the artists are currently studying a pHD exploring how time, space and
the constraints of motherhood influence
a creative practice. How will having dedicated time and space to focus on their
work influence their ongoing research? How will the experience of A Room of
One's Own link up with their practice and theory?Join us on Saturday to find
out and to ask questions!
Single Figures - Prosaic Gallery, Sheffield
Prosaic Gallery, Sheffield
Dec 2021 - Jan 2022
Single Figures
Two paintings produced during online lockdown life-drawing class with Giles Deacon hosted by Sarabande Foundation.
Thursday, 18 November 2021
The Last Cartwheel 12th November -6th December 2021 Existential House, Birkenhead
The works are made with whatever is to hand and has connections to a series of works (1989) I made after I had children. My practice had changed from making big paintings in a studio with plenty of time to making A4 work on a desk after the children had gone to bed. As a result, the pieces were collages - using a mixture of painted pieces, current magazines and newspapers and old memorabilia that was hanging around.
This concern with documenting the maternal in this way is not as clearly present when the practice is separate from the maintenance experience – for example, 1989 was very clearly about my lack of time and as such offers a different perspective on the idea of mother artist - yes, my work is about motherhood, but my lack of time is only a result of that.
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