The Shortlisted Artwork

Blinded is a small scale oil on board painting with two blurred figures on the backdrop of an ambiguously bright landscape. The protagonists clutch their eyes, sensitised to their surroundings as if they’ve emerged from captivity or are subjected to an onslaught of car headlights. The blurring of the forms parallels the quick pace at which we view digital photographs from the news as well as the hazy desert surrounding the characters. Russell removes signifiers of context, place and setting. Thus, her painting is less focused on the specificity of who is being featured and more enmeshed in the feeling that arises from web-surfing the news: the familiar yet disorienting mind-space that our digital devices transport us to. 

Artist Statement

Katherine Russell is a painter whose practice engages with our perception of mass media imagery. Her works point to the way in which digital photographs ­– through Iphones, computers, and other devices – permeate into our day-to-day lives, questioning their lasting effects on our collective consciousness. She considers the subjective means by which we each relate to these images according to our own specific background and cultural predisposition. In this way, her work questions the true meaning of mediatised moments from both an emotional and personal standpoint.
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Images, particularly those involving foreign conflicts and places that the artist will never experience in the flesh, are used as springboards to explore a vortex: the bizarre time-space we currently find ourselves in which is at once immediate but concurrently unreachable.

About the Artist

Katherine Russell was born in London where she lives and works. She holds an MA Fine Art Painting; City and Guilds London Art School and a BA (Hons) Fine Art Degree from University of Northumbria at Newcastle.

Online Exhibition

To learn more details on the below artworks email us at [email protected]