Stephen Russell-Brett
A South African contemporary artist working between Pretoria and Dublin. Through painting, paper sculpture, installation, photography and textile, his practice explores memory, ecological change and the practice of attention. Current work is gathered under Material Elegies.
Works
What Remains
Paintings tracing botanical presence, memory and disappearance.
Spectral Taxonomy
Layered paper works responding to coral bleaching and ecological change.
Metamorphosis
Origami installations and photographic works exploring personal loss and remembrance.
Fugitive Landscapes
Paintings of landscapes in transition, where forms emerge, shift and dissolve.
Selected Works
Independent, exhibition-led and archival works outside the primary collections.
Featured work
Liminal Specimens
Fifteen paper works form a field of related specimens. Layers of Hahnemühle paper and vellum are embossed, stained and disrupted, moving through bleaching, residual colour and dissolution. Together, the works consider coral loss through the changing surface and structure of paper.
The artist
Stephen Russell-Brett is a South African contemporary artist working between Pretoria and Dublin. His collections are gathered under Material Elegies, an ongoing enquiry into memory, ecological change and the practice of attention.
His works ask very little of you when you first arrive, except your presence. Then, if you choose to stay, they continue unfolding long after the first encounter.
Observation, lived experience and material fragility converge throughout the practice. Rather than holding change still, the work asks what it might mean to remain with it.
Journal
Essays, field notes and studio writing accompany the work, following the observations and questions that develop around it.
Publications
Artist books, catalogues and visual archives trace the development of the practice and the works that emerge from it.