Growing up and living in a small Appalachian town in East Tennessee, I am
continuously aware and amazed at the materials and objects that inhabitant my everyday life. They capture my attention and I try to take advantage of
this distraction to form a personal visual bond. My work will often incorporate
these local and found materials in collaboration with a manipulation of glass.
While this combination may seem arbitrary, I strive to make order of the
materials relevant to a personal consciousness. I am quite fond of glass as a
material for its versatility and its ability to transport added objects and media to
another point of reference. My work is always in series form. Sometimes the series may consist of two or three pieces and other series may approach one hundred. In my current series, I work to find directions utilizing the intrinsic properties of glass with the found and reworked objects to move toward a thematic and compositional visual statement. The challenge is to create order from diverse resources and to achieve a personal balance that honors my past, my present and my life.
Mark Russell, Jr.
Photography by:
Mike Solomon
John May
Ed Claycomb
Mark Russell