"Georgia Russell is a Scottish artist who uses a scalpel instead of a brush or a pen, creating constructions that transform found ephemera, such as books, music scores, maps, newspapers, currency and photographs. Represented by England & Co, she exhibited recent works in the gallery's December exhibition. She currently has three works included in the Holland Paper Biennial at the Coda Museum. Russell's next major exhibition will be held at England & Co in early 2009, and she will also have some works in the gallery's Summer Exhibition in July/August this year."
(thx LB)
"In the case of the painting I have just described, that lovingly textured broad-brimmed hat opens a door which leads from Vermeer's Delft westwards across the Atlantic Ocean to Canada, where buccaneering adventurers like Samuel de Champlain - leader of a French mission seeking a northwest passage through the Great Lakes to the Pacific in the 1600s - exchanged beaver pelts for firearms with the Huron chiefs to finance their journeys. Back in Europe, the underfur of those much-sought-after pelts was stewed in copper acetate and mercury-laced glue to make the very best felt for the most fashionable hats..."
I tot I taw a Creeley tat
"Gardening, like art, can counter the frenzy of our age, which is characterized by an aggravated consumerism that entails as its necessary correlate endless production and endless productivity. The daily turbulence that today’s capitalist economy requires militates against the sanctuaries of repose that I discuss throughout the book, of which gardens are typically a figure. My last chapter is titled “The Paradox of the Age.” The paradox is that, while the system is in a complete frenzy, what seems to be driving it is a desire to re-create a passive Edenic condition in which all the fruits of the earth will be provided for without care, labor, or pain—as if we could be consumer enjoyers of endless bounty. But the stories and myths that have come down to us through the ages, and which I treat in my book, tell us that the true source of human happiness is not consumption but cultivation, is not passive gratification but the assumption of active responsibility. That is why it’s all the more important to revisit the myth of Eden and to relearn its lesson, which I take to be the lesson of care. In my reading, the Eden story tells us that we needed to get out of that sterile, deathless environment in order to realize our human potential as mothers, fathers, husbandmen, statesmen, artists, friends, and caretakers of the earth..."
