Amy Russell
You’re Making My Life Hell, mixed media on paper.
Amy Russell is an artist and part-time lecturer, currently studying for a PhD with a research area time, space and motherhood; using paintings mixed media and performance practice to investigate how precarity, time constraints and motherhood impact on creative practice.
“Originally a painter I have also worked in Photography and Installation, often working with my own personal archive of sketchbooks, photographs, diaries etc My recent collages reconfigure the sketches and ephemera found in old sketchbooks (tickets from buses, gigs and the cinema, sweet wrappers, magazine clippings, scraps of paper with phone numbers) alongside maps and new elements.Paint clouds over and obscures details, foregrounding others. These works are about the moments, the autobiographical details, that the component elements represent, but they are also about the processes whereby those memories are themselves adapted, edited and shaped into a coherent personal history.”
The Last Cartwheel (as seen in the three above images) uses text and image and is an ongoing daily task-based painting project, essentially, making a painting as another task on a daily to-do list. It came about from feeling the pressure to make work alongside all my other domestic and work-related tasks and feeling if I could even put a daub of paint on a piece of paper, I could call myself a painter and get on with my day; doing all the other stuff that isn’t painting but might allow painting to happen again eventually.
The works are made with whatever is to hand and has connections to a series of works I made after I had children; 1989. 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 relates in some ways to the constraints inherent in a domestic life with a family; the schedules, the lists - a framework that you cannot deviate from either through necessity or choice. 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.