Michael Donnelly & Betty Russ

SITE LAB Artwork

Michael Donnelly & Betty Russ ‘Inside, A Collapsing Building’, 2023

Buildings provide us shelter and foster our sense of permanence and stability. They extend our private, internal spaces into the collective network, echoing the structures of thought, exploding our systems of reference and understanding into the spatial, material world our bodies occupy. Buildings also assimilate our physiological and psychological frailties with the complexities of the natural world, providing a teleological buffer, allowing us safety and comfort in an unpredictable landscape.

What is left when we no longer maintain communion with our buildings?

On entering an abandoned building, the sense of post-human intervention is evident. Amongst the remnant material utterances of human activity, hybrid forms and systems develop, cybernetic and cellular mutations coalesce and evolve, adapting new ways and means of survival in the pursuit of consciousness. Speculative science fiction predicts worlds of post humanity persisting, perhaps carrying the imprint of our collapse and rending a new world laid bare of human intervention.

Making contact with our non-human selves our work seeks to address this possible future, where human technologies are perpetuated in mutant forms by non-human entities and forces carrying forward an awareness of the catastrophic consequences of unchecked monocultural dominance.

Ad-hoc water vessels, pumping sustenance to and from micro-worlds, apparently non-sentient amalgamations of matter triggered by human presence, sensing movement and responding with sound and light. Understanding of objects and apparatus is familiar, yet against interpretation.

Timbers, cement, pvc tubing, plaster, paint, wiring, UV lighting, plastic tarps, electronic devices, water, and incidental weeds creep through the space like mimetic ghosts, improvising possible futures.

About the Artist

Michael Donnelly and Betty Russ are artists and arts workers living on Widjabul-Wyabul land of the Bundjalung Nation (Lismore), New South Wales. Michael’s practice is a broad investigation of abstraction and transcendence through multiple mediums including painting, assemblage, performance and sound. Working across sculpture, assemblage, installation, sound, and embodied research, Betty’s practice ferments between and around the philosophies and renderings of eschatological terror, speculative+/science fiction, hauntology, spirituality, the-weird-and-the-eerie. Material manifestations protrude from hypnagogic fantasy, searching for psychological mitigation to the abject shock of the past, and sweaty white-knuckled fear of the future. 

Betty and Michal are co-founders of Elevator ARI, an emerging artist-run gallery and studio space.