LIZ Russell-Arnot is like the incredible anthropocene art sculptures she creates, where the sum of all the parts, whether shiny, broken or seemingly insignificant, have been put together to make something amazing.
Happily ensconced in Longford, other than a morning sojourn to buy a coffee, she admits she doesn’t get out that much – a series of health issues including breast cancer means pitting her immune system against circulating viruses is not wise. She’s happy in her own company, and few know about the colourful, creative world in her cocoon which is nearly bursting at the seams.
The 72-year-old has been concentrating on her ever-growing collection of artworks in preparation for an exhibition in Melbourne later this year.
Possibly the only person in the state who welcomes old, defunct electronic “junk” being dropped off at her door, she carefully deconstructs computers, phones, irons and televisions to access the motherboards, wiring and other elements that she turns into exquisite, whimsical artwork. Her living room looks somewhat like a cross between a jeweller’s workshop, a pawn shop and a teenager’s blingy bedroom. In fact the whole house, brimming with her art, is an optical overload that conveys her feelings around human behaviour, politics, religion, the environment and health.
“My whole life I have used art as my voice because it can’t be silenced – and I can convey what I believe are social and political truths,” she said. “Spanish artist Francisco Goya is one of my primary influences. He said: ‘Always lines, never forms! But where do they find these lines in nature? For my part I see only forms that are lit up and forms that are not. There is only light and shadow.’ ”
Liz grew up at Carnarvon, Cressy, an adopted child of mixed Indigenous heritage who demonstrated her artistic talents from an early age. She was writing and illustrating stories before she even began school. A fast learner with an insatiable appetite for knowledge, she was given free rein to explore her artistic side at boarding school, including taking up the piano and classical guitar.
“The natural history art evolved from spending all my spare time in the bush where the flora and fauna became a familiar world to me, I had a need to express how wonderful and beautiful they were and I started painting them using watercolours and it just never ended really,” she said.
Liz married young and had children young, two boys and a girl. Both boys were born with cystic fibrosis, a genetic disease that resulted when two recessive genes unknowingly came together. The family moved to Melbourne where the boys could receive appropriate health care and Liz worked as both a counsellor and teacher of Indigenous art at Healesville, Warburton and at Swinburne University.
By their early 20s both boys required double lung transplants, and tragically Liz’s oldest son Jeffrey, a budding geologist, died nine months after his operation, aged 24, not from complications with the transplant but because with his new-found health he took up swimming and he was one of seven people to pick up a virus at a public swimming pool. Her younger son, Phil, is currently one of the longest-lived double lung transplant recipients in the country, married with two children and a neuro scientist who is the lead on a bionic eye project at Monash University.
Her daughter Nicole was a DJ in Sydney, Canberra, Adelaide and Melbourne, musician and writer with a Masters in Dystopian British Literature and now works in PR for Bentley in England.
For a while the family lived in Queensland, where Liz became a flying music teacher to remote outback communities as part of a pilot program she helped set up with politician Vince Lester. She was encouraged to squat in unoccupied mining homes until eventually funding came through for a house, dedicated to the Flying Music Teacher Scheme.
“I was sick of driving for up to six hours to get to the centres that needed a teacher and one day a friend flew me there instead which I loved. “I later spotted the Mackay Aero Club and I called in on a club day for a look and before I knew it the club president was taking me up in a Beechcraft Baroness twin engine plane and I’ve been poor ever since!” she laughed. “I think I’ve always been an adrenalin junkie. “I always wanted to be a race car driver, I’d climb the tallest trees, it was as if I was seeking danger — and flying pushed every button.”
Despite the demand the lack of teachers willing to work in the outback saw the flying music teacher program fold and Liz, now divorced, moved back to Launceston to work in a high-end music shop in George St. When business was slow she would sit in the back of the shop and draw.
After the short-lived business closed Liz re-married and bought a house in Trevallyn where she started a private gallery and worked hard to achieve a Churchill Fellowship. This allowed her to travel the world: England, Europe, America, India, studying the history and the teaching of natural history and scientific art which in Australia was not a subject available for study compared to the Northern Hemisphere. “I remember the British Museum of Natural History saying that Australian natural history papers were not worth using due to the poor quality illustrations,” she said.
When she was funded to lead an Australian Geographic exhibition to Hunter and Trefoil islands in Bass Strait, she jumped at the chance to bring a team of scientists and creatives together. “On Trefoil I spotted a juvenile storm petrel on the beach. It didn’t fly away when I approached and it had a plastic bag hanging out of his mouth,” Liz recalled.
“I picked the bag up and tried to pull it out and his guts came out with it and I felt like a murderer and felt ashamed to be a human being in that moment. “It changed my artistic focus on to investigating human behaviour and pollution of the ocean and that’s when sculpture became the best way to illustrate what I wanted to express.”
Sculptures of fish made out of transparent plastic and filled with plastic litter, a turtle with beer can plastic rings choking his neck and some jellyfish made from plastic soft drink bottles with long plastic tendrils feature in the artist’s body of work. It was while on one these expeditions, to Stack Island off the southern tip of Hunter Island, that Liz and her team found themselves marooned.
The fisherman commissioned to take them there overnight dropped them off okay, reminding them to be ready at 6am the next morning for departure. They took the bare necessities, for one academic that meant a box of wine, which proved invaluable. The fisherman did not return for another eight days, having been unknowingly seconded by the Australian government to search for Sydney to Hobart yacht Great Expectations which had gone missing. “We had to hunt for mussels and fish for food and luckily we caught some mutton birds that flew into our tent,” Liz said. “The wine bladder became useful when combined with some tent poles and a billy to distil sea water which we boiled day and night to make about one cup of fresh water perhour.”
The illustrated journals from those exhibitions are beautiful and informative. They are in good company with the many children’s books Liz has also written, illustrated and sold nationally and internationally. Liz also writes poetry and short stories and her collection of Aboriginal cultural artifacts is currently being catalogued.
In her 60s Liz went back to university to gain a Masters of Contemporary Art and then, with University of NSW, she completed a Masters of Cross Disciplinary Art and Design online. She never stops learning and experimenting and speaking out about issues such as mandatory detention, repurposing and conservation through her art. And her get-on-with it attitude has served her well through many of life’s adversities.
“You can’t focus on life’s problems, yes they’re in your heart and mind and triggers might take you back to it, but no one should waste their life and when I lost my son I know he would have wanted me to do my best, just as he did with his life.”
Liz is the former vice president and now publicity officer for the Tasmanian Society of Women Writers.
Her upcoming exhibition, which she is considering showing locally before going to Melbourne, will be complemented by the work of sound artist Nat Grant and lighting artist Gina, with each visitor setting in motion a pattern of sound and lighting unique to their experience.