Elizabeth Russell-Arnot

And I am currently sculpting in the Anthropocene arts. I, yes, I'm working in Tasmania. Yes. In Northern Tasmania, but I do travel right around the state to source materials and inspiration for my work. Yes. The anthrop the term Anthropocene was coined by a Dutch chemist called Paul Crutzen. He's a, um, Nobel prize winning chemist in Holland.

And he identified at a conference the fact that the period that we are living in is one that has been influenced or the geological era that we're living in has been influenced by man. And it is the first era that he can see that has been able to be identified while it is forming. So it's become very interesting because it's the effect of the ma of man and his behavior on the planet. Not just on the geology, but on the behaviors as well, but it affects just about every aspect of society.

All I would say every aspect. Yeah. The influence of that came quite some time ago, I was doing some expeditions with the Australian geographic and Dick Smith had sponsored those expeditions. And we were on an island called Trefoil island, which is very well known as a mutton birding island for the local Aboriginal people. And. While we were on Trefoil island I was walking on the beach. Oh, it was a little Rocky shore. And I noticed a tiny little bird, a little fairy prion.

And it was probably, oh, I don't know. Only just out of the nest. It was still furry, not feathered, but it had a piece of plastic hanging out of its mouth. And as I walked up to it, it didn't move away. So I picked it up and tried to remove the plastic from its mouth. And when I pulled the plastic out, it, the entire its intestines came with it.

And I was in that moment confronted with the effect of human behavior on the wildlife and on the environment and that began my commitment to making other people aware of their behavior and the things they're demanding and using, and its effect that it leaves on the rest of the world. I'm trying to change the conversation that we have about things that we no longer use and the terminology that we use, because I believe it starts there.

And we infect those we speak to, with the effect of the words we use about those materials. So I'm reusing computer parts, television parts, electronic parts from all sorts of, yeah, just all sorts of things. And I am converting them and revaluing them into probably I'd say fairly high end art pieces and sculptures, but the narrative in the work addresses the issues. So you can read the narrative in the work and relate it back to the problem or the situation of the anthropocene.

Hmm. I did a series called by the book. Once again, it focuses on human behavior, but it is primarily focused on how the words in books are taken by the people who read them and they're taken as their own. The people take them as if they've written them and it's their idea. And then they behave according to those words. And not only that, they treat other people according to how those words go.

And that can become a very big problem because they don't research the person who wrote the book and say, was he influenced and by whom and for what reason? And I know this is gonna be controversial for some people, but I did one of a prayer book and I take the pages out of the prayer book and then I create figures out of those pages. But I, I read the book before I destroy it. Well, I don't think I'm, I don't think of it as being destroyed.

It's just reshaped and the words that have created the problem that people have taken as gospel or taken as their own are the ones I coat the figure in. So I'm saying when you read the book, it dresses you in its words. Yeah. And the people who then look at the sculpture can read those words. Yeah. An example would be the prayer book. I made a figure carrying the book on its back, and it was stooped as if it was a very weighty burden.

Another one off that series was important to me as an enforced adoption baby. And I was taken by the salvation army and I won't go into all the details at the moment, but I took the salvation army songbook and made a baby out of the pages and a shackle and chain, and then chained to the book. And what I'm saying with that is my life is for ever until the day I die and the life of my children been affected by that action of taking me from my mom.

Yeah. I was doing a masters of contemporary art at the university of Tasmania and sculpture from the skip was a two week unit that you could do to add credit to your masters. And I thought, oh, that sounds really interesting. I'd always fiddled with 3d. I have a, I have a, a love of the feeling of, of my work. I like to be able to feel what I'm doing and painting doesn't give me that. There's a barrier, the paint brushes between me and the work, whereas sculpture I'm right into it.

So. I thought I would like to try that. And I went and I randomly picked up all this metal and plastics and things, and I picked them up from the tip face or from the, the metal pile, because Longford is not a, where I live the tip is not ag landfill. It's all shipped out. So I picked all this up and took it back and used it to create a garden in the desert if you like of metal swimming pool sides, kitchen items of plastic kitchen items.

And I started as I was working to feel that I was able to speak through the work and tell people my ideas. And I created a, a desert garden out of the metal in Aboriginal colors, as much as I could. And from there, I went on to using plastics and I made a very big fish, probably about a meter wide meter long and made it out of soft drink bottles and filled it with rubbish.

So you could see through the fish and it had all the plastic, unwanted plastic inside of it and some hanging out of its mouth, because that reminded me of the bird that I found I've been influenced very, very strongly by that little bird and forevermore. I think it really changed my direction. I always loved nature. And I was trying to express the depth of my love of nature through the work, but I couldn't quite be happy enough with it. I could make my paintings as perfect as I could.

And I was, I had a big career doing it, but that, wasn't what I wanted. I wanted to say more, want to talk about ideas rather than objects. I went into OPSM one day and just saw a pile of lenses in a bag. And they were throwing them in the rubbish tin. And I said to them, where are they going from there? And they said, oh, they going to landfill. We don't save any of them. And we don't reuse any of them. So I said, I think that's inappropriate. I'd like to be the place where they go.

So I. Get to all O PSM shops, but I do have two that I go to and they said, yeah, we'll keep them for you. So I go in there every three months and pick up the lenses and I've been using them to make sculptures. The first sculptures were, I found some acrylic curtain rings at the tip and I straightened them with heat and then attached the lenses like leaves, branches, and leaves. And then I had to put something on the leaves.

Didn't I . So I wanted it to tell a story about those materials and the importance of putting them in the ground. And so I created some bugs and that was the beginning of the bugs. That piece. Yeah, the first one to a little grub like creatures. And then I thought OPSM eye glass lenses, let's try a flying bug. So. Gave the first bug some lenses, made a few mistakes. Nothing I do is designed to go together. The parts aren't designed to match.

So I have to create ways and experiment a lot to find ways of making them match. So, you know, drilling, screwing, riveting, nuts, and bolts, you name it and gluing some of them. Although I don't like gluing, I'm not confident of the, of the longevity of glues. So I try to make them a more permanent fixture if I can. And with the bugs I have now made over 500. The new form of warfare that the government is using is swarm warfare. And it's a technological warfare.

And I see these bugs as being a euphemism for that. And the bugs made out of computer material. People call them bugs and they see them as. But they're not because they're computer parts. And so I like confusing their brain and sending it to another place. I did two years of a degree at the university, but in the middle of the degree, I was awarded a Churchill fellowship for my work. And so I traveled to England, the United States, Germany, Austria, Italy, and then came home via Indonesia.

Yeah. And it was very interesting because I, I was studying the natural history arts and the preservation of artworks that had been done and, and the teaching of natural history art because in America it's a degree subject and it wasn't even a subject anywhere in Australia. And I was in England at the British museum of natural history and they, they were just walking in and I was meeting them for the first time and they said, oh, what are you here for?

And I said, I've arranged to meet with da, da, da x people, and to look at such and such. And they said, oh, you're from Australia, aren't you? And I said, yes. And they said, You know, we don't even look at the illustrations in Australian papers. They're so bad. I was so ashamed. Oh, I was so embarrassed. And so it was a very intense journey and I wrote a handbook when I came home on natural history illustration and it's lodged in Canberra with the Churchill fellows association.

And I never anticipated this alteration. It was finding that little bird that changed it. I knew I was looking for another way of expressing my thoughts in my work, but I hadn't realized that I would come across this little key moment in my life that turned me right around. Yeah. And I hardly paint now. Yeah. I think I'm getting older and my hand's not as steady as it was.

I'll do looser stuff and I have a couple of pieces to do, but I've got a house full of artwork and I've got to do something with it. Yeah. So anticipating an exhibition coming up yet to be organized, but it's already all the artwork's ready. Yes. Well, that's. That's the bugs. Yeah. And the, and the, um, pieces on the stands and everything. There's about gee, I've produced about 25 major pieces and then the 500 smaller pieces. The arts is an interdisciplinary.

It has the ability to cross across disciplines and to be useful and have an effect on the other discipline. It can, it can be useful to it. I did a project with the Tate and one of the Scottish universities, and we worked on the project that. Saw the trainee doctors using art to improve their communication skills with patients through learning, to explore concepts and ideas. It actually had was really very, very successful on the part of the date that Tate still run.

Units like that members of the health professionals can go into the Tate and actually do that course. And it's quite amazing. I want my art without having to speak about it to have an influence on people's thinking and the way they see the materials. It's so important to me that this conversation changes that the language we use changes because it currently, we devalue things we don't want.

So I need to take the words that devalue the materials out of my conversations and call them something else. So the people who hear me are influenced by a different word. The moment I say trash, it devalues the word. I used to go in an annual exhibition every year.

And. I worked very hard and I did put those original flowers in, but because the word trash was used for the exhibition, people didn't mind knocking into the artwork and knocking it over, not just mine, but other people's and there were artworks smashed because of it. And the value of that work was not seen because of the name of the exhibition. And I think it's really important that we change the conversation and the terminology we use.

Yeah. In order to create more awareness, a different awareness, because at the moment we can say it's made from trash. But people immediately go, oh, well it's not valuable art. There's no value in it. I don't need to go and see it, or I don't need to buy it, or I don't need to have anything to do with it. I'm not gaining from seeing it. Yeah. So I want them to change that. Yeah. It was a little tough. I was an adopted child, but not very happily.

So, and my adoptive parents were deeply religious. My adoptive mother was, and she had a saying in the old Testament, Deuteronomy chapter 23 versus one and two. And those two verses were her mantra for her life. And I won't recite the first one it's about men and their value, but the second one was about bastards. And it said a bastard shall not enter into the kingdom of the Lord nor to their 10th generation. And so those words, and this is what created the book theories.

Those words caused my mother to assume that I had no value because I was illegitimate. And so I wasn't allowed to achieve anything. I wasn't allowed to say what I thought I wasn't allowed to demonstrate intellect. And so I used art to do it, art and music. And so I started playing the piano at age five. And did I play, I thumped it. I composed, I, I was good at it. I remembered everything I ever played after the first playing.

So I didn't need to practice when I was playing, I was playing, I wasn't practicing. I was playing because I enjoyed it. Not because I needed to learn it anymore. So I found the arts was the voice that couldn't be silenced. And it started at a very young age. Very young. Yeah. I was about five, probably earlier four and a half. Five. I have nothing from that period because she used to burn all my art.

I think I used to draw things that made her uncomfortable so I was sent to boarding school when I was five and anything I did at home. When I went back home at the end of the year, there was nothing there. So she had destroyed it and I'd make more things. So by eight, I was going into the workshop. We were on a farm and I found a big sheet of copper delicious, lovely copper, which I started making foot jewelry and I made foot bangals.

And ring toe rings and all sorts of things I got into a little bit of trouble for using the copper , but I really enjoyed it. So I taught myself to solder on an old, ah, I don't even know what you call it, you know, the forge that blacksmiths used to heat their tools. I used to heap the soldering iron, a big, big wedge shaped tip on it in the forge, and then run over to the copper and weld it together with flux and everything.

Yeah. I didn't continue with that, but I don't think from those years there has been a time when I haven't, when I've been idle. I needed to make something or seen something I want to reconstruct. It became very serious after finding that little bird, I cried so much and it was the first time I've ever been aware of the fact that I was ashamed to be a human being. I like really deeply shamed at the effect of human behavior, doing that to an innocent little.

When I went to university to do the masters in order to work in the sculpture studio, I had to be ticketed. And so I had to demonstrate proficiency on about 13 different things. And so there was a chap in the studio. He ran through them all with me and he was happy enough with my proficiency on them. So that was good. I think my favorite thing in there was a plasma cutter, which was just like delicious, you know, water cutting through metal. And I hadn't experienced that. That was lovely.

Yeah. So I learned a few new things. I already knew a lot of them like metal rolling. I didn't know, things like that. I had to demonstrate safety aspects. So when I started working with the plastics, I had to write a health and safety manual for working with plastics in order to be allowed to continue working with plastics, which was really interesting. So I did a lot of research for that. I produced a sheet, a condensed sheet for public consumption.

And when I finished, I then was invited to give talks at rotary, um, prob and a lot of other organizations about the plastics. And I would hand this sheet out at every one of the talks and say, you need to be aware of your safety when you are using plastics. You know, you shouldn't heat this one, you shouldn't touch that without gloves and so on. Because it is quite frightening. They're all benzine based and quite toxic and they release the toxins under, heat. It's interesting.

At what level of knowledge we have, that the fear starts to emerge. You know, I've had a lot of people make changes because of what I've talked about or what they've seen. And they've actually contacted me and said, thank you. I've got rid of, they report back to me. It's really quite funny. They report back about how good they've been and about how many things they've thrown out and what they did with them. And I, of course, I have to say, don't throw them out. That's the problem.

You know, you need to repurpose them or contain them in some way without putting them in the ground, don't reuse them with food or, or anything that you might ingest or that any animals might ingest. So reshaping them is what, what I do. I mean, I've probably been in danger working with them for a long time, but you know, I'm getting old now. So, you know, I won't say it's okay, but it's not frightening because something will come and get me anyway. so I think I'll do this till a day I die.

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