ARTISTS IN CONVERSATION: PENNY EVANS AND BETTY RUSS

Thursday 15 February at the Lismore Regional Gallery — pop-up space

Hear from artists Penny Evans and Betty Russ about the processes and ideas behind their work in Earth Matter.

About Penny Evans

Penny Evans is Lismore-based. Her ceramics and mixed media collages connect with family, community, and national histories in the wake of colonisation. She is the recipient of numerous awards and residencies and exhibits her work nationally, including CEREMONY, the 4th Indigenous Art Triennial at the National Gallery of Australia in 2022.

The focus of my art is always identity, country, and decolonising and my practice is a process driven enquiry. My artwork creates a trail over time, which mark and illustrate my decolonising journey back to who we are, back to country, back to country within me. There’s a lineage of ideas, a mapping. My interrogation is through the process of making, so it’s about DNA mixed with ideas gathered from many people and places, from country and kin.

About Betty Russ

Betty Russ is an artist and arts worker living on Widjabul Wia-bul country, Bundjalung Nation (Lismore). Working across sculpture, assemblage, installation, sound, and embodied research, her practice ferments between and around the philosophies and renderings of eschatological terror, speculative +/ science fction, hauntology, spirituality, the-weirdand-the-eerie. Material manifestations protrude from hypnagogic fantasy, searching for psychological mitigation to the abject shock of the past, and sweaty white-knuckled fear of the future. Betty is also co-founder of Elevator ARI, an emerging artist- run gallery and studio space.

‘The Monster’

The twin strobes of ‘The Monster’, and imminent global catastrophe have long created a tension around the vegetal, the-morethan-human, philosophy and the future. Popular culture uses speculative science fction, fantasy and horror as a means to both ferment, and ignore mounting eschatological terror. I am drawn to the unreal, unimaginable, the weird and eerie, queering, and provocative ideas that emerge from making experimental investigations of other possible worlds to describe these tensions. Seeking to identify false gods and the exhaltative exploitation of earth matter as a means of hyper-individuation and extractive capitalism, ‘Voiding Sartorial Sublimation’ is ironically both a praising and a parody of the elements of contemporary capitalised spirituality. Dreamed up while escaping into