Libby Russell Art

FACEBOOK // TWITTER Mixed media art and events. Currently working on moral, ethical and environmental issues, consumerism, alternative ways of operating and social ideas towards such themes.

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Yesterday I exhibited a bin food installation at Bristol Student Sustainability Summit 2015. Visitors can take items from the shelf and payment is to take a food waste fact card and start a discussion. When they’re done with the card, they can post it their local MP (the address pre-written on the back of the card). It went really well and it was a great event with lots of workshops about addressing sustainability. I’ll blog the food waste fact in coming posts! Watch this space. 

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A very successful food waste installation at Bristol SU yesterday :)

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Inspired by the social activist group Guerrilla Girls, we take a look at some important female artists working now.

Another little article I wrote a while back about current female artists.

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The seeds I planted here were from a freegan pepper and finally they’re sprouting after I thought it was a lost cause! The pots are from the rubbish and I used a plastic egg tray to start the seeds off, like a mini greenhouse. I have great plans for these babies! 

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Future fossils, the art legacy of the internet

With rapidly evolving technological advances, post-internet art discusses how humanity goes forward alongside machines.

How we interact with so much internet. 

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This year's Edinburgh Art Festival brings the immersive and complex conceptual world created by Charles Avery to engulf us.

Charles Avery at Edinburgh Art Festival

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The ambitious upcoming international photography fair, Photo London, has attracted a lot of attention.

I recently began an internship at ROOMS magazine, London. Here’s my first online published article about Photo London and Michael Corridores work there. 

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Louiza Hamidi has recently competed a half marathon in Southampton fuelling herself solely on food waste for the duration of her training period, raising awareness of the food waste issue.

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Photos and podcast: Feminism, Fifty Shades of Grey and The Father | Terri Paddock

How far have we come with feminism since August Strindberg was writing in the 1880s? “About halfway,” said Polly Toynbee on Monday night at Trafalgar Studios,

A few weeks ago, I attended a performance at Trafalgar Studios of The Father, the story of a military man living in a house with his housekeeper, wife and daughter. A conflict of interest between the man and his wife leads to some emotional manipulation on both parts and so begins their descent.  The part I really went for - the panel discussion, took several viewpoints on what was happening. One view was that the wife is in a rarely seen position of power such as in Gone Girl, where she is able to manipulate her husbands mind to her advantage. However, another opinion was that the opposite is true; the wife is powerless, backed into a corner and so uses the only means available to fight back. The view I find perhaps most interesting is that the persistent, manipulative portrayal of the wife is a projection of the male, her immediate response to every argument seems too perfect, too pre-constructed. ‘She made me do it’; to place the blame of his madness on his wife runs parallel with the defence of many domestic abuse perpetrators. The panel also discussed the recent film release of 50 Shades Of Grey and a question that I still ponder is; If the book is destructive, is the film adaption by extension also destructive as a brand or can the two exist as separate entities, different works of art by different people, interpreted and delivered differently?  

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Artsnight, 3. Armando Iannucci

Armando Ianucci looks afresh at high culture - poetry, classical music and fine art.

This episode is truly brilliant. It questions the categorisation of the arts as a kind of higher being for the privileged classes. It enforces that art is for everyone. It asks if art is a luxury in times of austerity. Is it only about profit and loss? 

It highlights the terrifying practice of gallery visits, mentioning the expectation to inherently understand art. 

In my view, art is necessary in all financial states. It is leads us to and provides us with means to question things, confront things, deal with things. 

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Louise Bourgeois

Currently on show at Southampton City Gallery is an exhibition entitled ‘ARTIST ROOMS: Louise Bourgeois, A Woman Without Secrets’, a small selection of the artists works.

Louise Bourgeois is known for her confessional art. Her work follows themes of childhood trauma and emotion, paying attention to double standards of gender and sexuality, and regarding memory as a type of architecture. With focus on her mother and father, her father having cheated on Bourgeois mother and her mother dying when Bourgeois was young, the work is highly personal and emotive.

On exhibition there is a rounded collection of Bourgeois’ work, spanning across her time as an artist. Beginning with the room of bronze sculptures including Janus Fleuri, an ambiguous sculpture reminiscent of internal organs and widely interpreted as representing a struggle between genders.

The exhibitions second room contains one of Bourgeois many ‘Cell’ works. Also sharing the space, are sewn fabric models hanging in the abstracted form of human bodies. One piece shows the bodies contorted around each other in different fabric, presumably representing male and female with pinstripe and lace. The other figure entitled ‘Single II’ shows just one large male body without a head. Where the head is missing, there is stitching suggestive of female genitalia. Both pieces, using the act of needlework, heavy with significance as its offset, explore the relationship and distinction between male and female in an inquisitive manner.

Finally, in the third room lies the more recent work, ‘Maman’. This work, as of much of Bourgeois work, is regarding her mother. The large and dominating sculpture is not of slender form but an industrial metal construct which is knobbly and awkward. The spider structure looms over the viewer, almost in an intimidating manner. This work represents the constant labour of a mother, always protecting her young. It takes us away from the gentle and fragile image of femininity and paints the idea of the industrial female.

The fact that much of this work was made many years ago does not detract from it’s relevance now. These issues haunted Bourgeois and she saw making art as a way to maintain sanity, to cope but the issues themselves apply to everyone regardless of their upbringing and background. Everyone must find a way to interact with gender in all forms and come to their own understanding of that, exploring their way of managing it.

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Food Waste Cafe - Libby Russell and Louiza Hamidi - Southampton Solent Fine Art & Art Enterprise

Food Waste Café is a pop-up, community installation that serves dishes made from discarded food. Initiated by artists Louiza Hamidi and Libby Russell, the café invites guests to sit, eat and share conversation in a welcoming, thought-provoking environment. Food Waste Café is predominantly composed of products salvaged from bins - inclusive of its edible ingredients, cooking utensils, crockery and décor. Directly confronting the severity of waste in Southampton, the café represents an alternative catering establishment that survives primarily on the surplus generated by consumerism. At Food Waste Café this surplus is redefined and given its original purpose once more. This simultaneously reduces the amount that reaches landfill and creates a space where these issues can be discussed. Food Waste Café’s ethics situate themselves within the anti-consumerist and ecological framework associated with Freeganism. This practice adopts alternative lifestyle choices to minimize participation in conventional economy by utilizing post-consumer goods. Opposing materialism and the extreme amount of waste it produces, Food Waste Café contributes to this activist movement and explores the social responses that surround it. Conscious of the governing relationship between money and consumerism, Food Waste Café will not purchase new resources nor charge for its services - removing financial transactions altogether. Morally, the café agrees that the dishes on its menu deserve to be available to guests at no cost. Likewise, guests are invited to take away other salvaged objects with them so that there’s a constant cycle of redistribution. A primary contradiction is how the abstinence of ownership, which is commonly associated with Freeganism, opposes how Food Waste Café takes temporary possession of found products. It regulates the trafficking of local food waste, gaining a sense of control over these items and contradicting its core values regarding the deconstruction of ownership. Food Waste Café explores the utopian ideal of an existence without waste, but is firmly grounded within reality when confronted with the waste it inevitably produces. It does not dictate that it is possible to be entirely waste free, but takes every feasible measure to dispose of as little as it can. Furthermore, Food Waste Café endeavours to be entirely transparent about the contents of its bins, rejecting the standard practices of waste management within the catering industry and taking honest responsibility for its leftovers. This transparency is symbolic of the limitations that arise from a potentially unattainable utopian goal. Food Waste Café frames the relational potential of an institutional space, by temporarily constructing a social installation which depends on the participation of others. The café’s primary interest is to instigate dialogue.

If you'd like to follow Food Waste Cafe on Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/foodwastecafe/timeline

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Herman Asselberghs - Dear Steve (2010)

On show last year at Akademie der Künst during Berlin Art Week 2014, this piece is centred around the deconstruction of a new Macbook Pro. Overlaying the visual, is the artists voice speaking to Steve Jobs.

It is somewhat unnerving to watch the dismantling of an object which has become, to many, so essential in modern western culture that it is an extension of ones self. The lengthy video discusses the origin of the parts and the labour involved in making them, so far away from the finished product sitting on a desk and so far removed from the image it would like to portray. This piece ultimately confronts the viewer with the issue of globalisation in what feels like a step by step overview of realisation. 

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EXOTICA and 4 other cases of the self - me Collectors Room

A Masters Degree show curated by Fanny Nina Borel, Myrto Katsimicha, and Elisabetta Rabajoli, this exhibition reframes the concept of Wunderkammern which is a preexisting collection of curiosities at the gallery. Here, the individual viewer is the Wunderkammer and encouraged to question the concept of the self. 

An accompaniment to the exhibition is a series of essays written by each of the curators discussing important issues central to ones perception of self such as the presence of the internet and it's affect on our capacity and care, the certainty of instant access to information and the boredom that stems from this. 

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The opening of Berlin Art Week 2014 at Akademie der Künste. At such a high profile event with so much to see, the building and its grounds were full to the brim. The scene depicts the queuing system to enter the main gallery. The crowd in the image impatiently gaze upward watching those above take selfies with the crowd. One is left to wonder if this act is itself the work of art they were here to see. 

After waiting so long in the complete lack of order below, when the visitor is given permission to continue on to the exhibition, they are suddenly in no rush. They are content to spend ten minutes documenting and discussing the crowd before entering the exhibition. Perhaps this is a constructed work of Relational Aesthetics of which Bourriaud spoke.?

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With my next clothes swap coming up in a few days, I want to share with you an inspiring clothes swap experience I had in Berlin (Where I cycled to, couch surfing along the way. But that's a story for another day). These clothes swaps are run every week by a volunteer based group called Kulturlabor Trial and Error who run events for social improvement and sustainability. Upon arriving at the swap (Mareschstraße 10, Neukölln if you want to find it), I noticed a box of bananas saved from waste which immediately put me in a good mood. The rules were the same as any other clothes swap but the thing that was most inspiring for me was the knowledge and genuine interest of the volunteers. They told me about a recycling festival happening that weekend at a nearby squat. Berlin, although having a steady tourist flow and being a capital city is still relatively poor, with many run down areas after the war. What I love about Berlin is that despite this, there are many people willing to work hard with what they have to enable social progression and alternatives. 

I hope my clothes swaps can inspire others in a similar way to consider an alternative to their routine. 

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Environmental Rock Festival - Clothes Swap

Yesterday I held a clothes swap at Southamptons Environmental Rock Festival. I predicted a lot of people would show up not knowing about the clothes swap and therefore not bringing any clothes to swap. For this reason I put out a donations jar so that if people wanted clothes but had nothing to swap, they could donate to next years Environmental Rock. This is the first time I have introduced any kind of money into clothes swaps and I do not know how to feel about it. Does this take away from the idea of free economy? Is it unfair or insulting to those who bring their clothes to swap? 

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Goldsmiths postgrad open day

I don't plan on returning to study this academic year but I went to London for Goldsmiths' open day this week to check out their MA Contemporary Art Theory course. I think it would be wise to spend at least two summers of reading in preparation! I'm going to St Martins open day to check out a few other courses too!