Artist Profile: Thomas Russell

Visual projection and installation artist Thomas Russell is a busy man. Right now he's on tour doing live video artwork for Melbourne band Tehachapi. He's soon taking part in the Gertrude St Projection Festival and exhibiting at its after party, Sensory Overload. “My work is about getting my visions and inner imaginations and applying them in practical way to the world.” Russell says. “I explore themes of connectedness and altered states of perception. As well as ideas of human conciseness and its place in the natural world.” For the Gertrude St Festival, Russell will take over the front window of Wild Bar with You Are Environment, an interactive video display. “Giving an audience a chance to interact with an art piece and essentially create the art, reminds them that they are there in that moment, and get back into the 'now' in a fun way,” Russell explains. For Sensory Overload, he is producing a projection sculpture called Infinite Wild Flower II, a continuation of a piece he showed at the Sugar Mountain Festival last year.

“It is partly inspired by the William Blake poem, Auguries of Innocence. My aim is that the slightly meditative nature of the projection mapped sculpture will inspire deep thought.”

Thomas Russell - Gertrude St Projection Festival, Opening 20 July.