TRANSECTS ARTIST NORTH-EAST SCOTLAND
Kirsty’s practice is concerned with the ways our bodies rub up against political and social structures, and the continuous exertion this puts on the body. Prompted by witnessing this impact on the bodies of family members but recognising this experience is true for many working-class bodies, held in intergenerational aches.
Working with sculpture, social practice and moving image, Kirsty’s recent projects have turned to textiles – intertwined with bodies through production, use, and care – as a lens to explore embodied experiences and their broader social contexts. She is drawn to the ways textiles hold and organise information, and the tactile way they transmit memory. Telling stories, even as, like fabric, memories fade, wear through and go threadbare.
In her recent project, Practising Bodies, Kirsty drew correlations between handling practices for textile conservation, casting process and the manners by which people are moved and handled in nursing practices. She developed this work with healthcare workers in Aberdeen, including her mum and sister who work in the NHS.
Industry moves us, and the marine energy sector moves the north-east of Scotland repeatedly, like waves, shaping relationships to place. Drawing on local archives and collections, storylines and place-based workshops with TRANSECTS will inform one another, to build complex, overlapping and adjacent understandings of marine energy in the north-east. During her residency Kirsty will develop place-based work in a way that is responsive to north-east communities with a focus on relationships.
Kirsty graduated from Gray’s School of Art in 2013 and has lived and developed her practice in the north-east since then. Her work expands into places of care, such as hospitals and schools, through project worker and other supporting roles.
Recent exhibitions of Kirsty’s work include In Our Spaces, Outer Spaces (2025), Practicing Bodies, Cubitt Gallery (2024), Talbot Rice Residents Exhibition, Talbot Rice Gallery (2024), Betwixt, Mimosa house (2024), Platform: 2021, Edinburgh Art Festival (2021), A Spoon is the Safest Vessel, Glasgow Women’s Library (2019) and Common Positions, Jerwood Staging Series (2019).
In 2018 she was selected to undertake Syllabus IV, a collaboratively-produced alternative learning programme, jointly delivered by Wysing Arts Centre, Spike Island, Studio Voltaire, S1 Artspace, Eastside Projects and Iniva. In 2019 she was a Jerwood Bursary recipient. From 2022–24, Kirsty was a resident at Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh College of Art, The University of Edinburgh.
For three months at the end of 2024, she was in residence at Fonderie Darling, Montreal and Gare de Matapedia, Matapedia.
Web: https://kirstyrussell.co.uk