Christine Matthews / Artist
Elizabeth Russell-Arnot works in multimedia disciplines with an element of research into contemporary social, educational and environmental issues. This is her second time living in Tasmania, where she initially worked as a painter under the name of Elizabeth Richardson.
She is currently working on Palawa country in Tasmania, Australia, having previously had a career as a painter and art teacher in Victoria, Australia.
Her work was initially in the environmental and scientific arts, recognised with the awarding of a Churchill Fellowship which took her to the UK, Europe and the USA to study the history, education of and the collections of Natural History Art at major institutions such as The British Museum of Natural History, Kew Gardens Collections, London, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Field Museum in Chicago and the Natural History Museums in Bavaria.
Elizabeth moved into sculpture after completing a Masters of Contemporary Arts at the Tasmanian University, followed by completing a second Masters in Cross Disciplinary Art and Design at the College of Fine Arts at the University of New South Wales.
Her change in direction was directly influenced by finding a small bird choking on plastic on the beach of a remote uninhabited island in the Bass Strait. When she attempted to help it, the bird’s intestines came out and it passed away. It was in that moment that her commitment to keeping unwanted materials out of the environment manifested into using those materials to express her understanding of the causes of such human behaviour and its results.
Elizabeth has used unwanted books, plastics of various kinds, household items that are destined for landfill and electronic parts from a wide variety of technology to create pieces which carry narrative of the effect of those items on the planet and the causes of the human behaviour that create the problem of environmental degradation in the first place.
As new issues emerge, they become a new part of the work, with associated materials becoming the method of construction and transferring the narrative to the viewer.