Artist's Statement

Prior to commencing an MFA post graduate course in contemporary art at Kingston School of Art (2022), Lyndsay Russell was a best-selling author and illustrator. She currently lives and works on a houseboat named Solaris moored on the Thames.

 

Drawn towards the unknown universe and it’s speculative theories, Lyndsay Russell’s practice revolves around dark matter and light energy, other-worlds and hidden dimensions. Her current works are in-situ process based, using the wind and rhythm of the waters surrounding her boat to move inks, oils and paints across containers of river water. These wave traces of the river’s movements are then either photographed, videoed or transferred to paper. The resulting images are either printed on silk and animated by a fan or shown on a large monitor accompanied by her own electronic music score. Other images are laminated in glass or Perspex and can be lit softly from behind.

​

The process and work are informed by Stanislaw Lem’s science fiction novel Solaris in which a spaceship laboratory hovers above an ocean-covered planet. Russell’s boat of the same name begins to act as Lem’s space station whereby the surface/river is in an information feedback loop, with the cosmological and the personal in correspondence.

​

Utilising the same gravity-wave oscillations found in space, she creates miniature ethereal nebulae water worlds via a myriad of inks, oils and paints, sunlight and LED lighting.

​

Her Aqua Nebulae series are not cold, computer-digitalised creations, but hands-on creative conjuring that plays with perceptions and the parameters of reality.

​

Russell says, “Fluid dynamics take over – the drops swirling round items with all the subtle or rough oscillations that nudge the hull. Using delicate tools I encourage the ink shapes, playing with the viscosity of both the river water and the paints to create very different, aleatory imprints”.