DISCIPLINE: MULTIDISCIPLINARY ARTIST
INFORMATION: Penelope Anne Russell is a multidisciplinary artist born in Kent, England, and has been based out of Wiltshire since. In 2023, Russell began her BA Fine Art at the Winchester School of Art (WSA), Southampton University. She completed her degree in 2026, graduating with a First.
While studying at the WSA, she was awarded the Nancy Balfour prize for Sculpture, for her timber sculptures across her discipline and primarily the installation for her final year exhibit. She has participated in several group exhibitions with her peers during her degree, displaying work at the Jubilee Sports Gallery in 2024 and 2025, Southampton University, as well as the Winchester Gallery in 2023.
The artist has since been selected by the post-graduate program Ripe to work in an exclusive artists collective of accomplished graduates selected from Southampton University to present exhibits in the historic God’s House Tower near Southampton’s port. At Ripe, Russell will be working to create collaborative displays from late 2026 through to mid-2027 and will be closely affiliated with A-Space Arts.
Alongside a few of her graduate peers from the WSA, Russell will be exhibiting her work at Safehouse, Peckham, in early September as the collective Tangent.
She continues to be based out of Southampton, though primarily lives and works in Wiltshire, near Frome.
PERSONAL STATEMENT:
I explore the local country around me in my multidisciplinary practice. I uncover extinct customs, aspiring to bring awareness to fragile ecosystems for people and nature.
My lived experiences of rural heritage in England inform my practice, using anecdote to discover intimate places between mortalities. Simultaneous to this, I illustrate visually internal and external histories in relations, considering both the painful and precious to depict uncertain environments to elicit an uncomfortable voyeurism in the viewer.
Much of my practice looks to rural England, exploring earthworks and endangered craft, having recently divulged into passementerie through illustration and sculpture, blowing up minute features nearly invisible in the home, to monstrous shadows lurking in one’s peripherals.
I present items from rural lore integrated into our modern habitats. Ghosts from ancient cultures, whispers of other worlds. From scrap materials I build burial mounds and stiles, trig points and cairns. By manufacturing ancient heritage with modern practices, I bring into question the role of permanence and conservation in the age of mass-manufactured immediacy. I ask the viewer to question the earth they stand on, to listen in careful contemplation for things forgotten, within them and without.
IMAGES/VIDEOS / PORTFOLIOS:
LINK TO PORTFOLIO
CONTACT DETAILS and LINKS:
Email: pennyrussell135@outlook.com
Instagram: @pound_coin_
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