COZETTE RUSSELL
Artist Statement
My interdisciplinary practice uses photography, video, sculpture, and text to explore poetic themes of transformation. My work suggests a subtle narrative of code and language building, and I am interested in communication through gesture, touch, and texture. In the studio, I employ this tactual intuition through process-driven experimentation with utilitarian materials, and I translate text into braille, which I hand punch into my photographs. I am drawn to explore multiple pathways of communication by a sensory desire to connect with my son, who is Deafblind.
Informed by this gaze of motherhood, disability, and translation, I'm also interested in the extraction of histories from objects––by ideas that memory can be stored and recorded in natural materials such as stone and earth. I use the body as material and expression to examine and confront these histories through repetitive labor and in sculptural forms. In building layers between language, history, and access, I'm thinking of the origins of my process, of the camera's lens and its receptive nature, and of light into touch and movement into light.