Young Talent V: Oneika Russell

Oneika Russell - Still from Drift (2010), written and produced by Tanya Davies

Biography

Oneika Russell was born in 1980, in Kingston, Jamaica. She was educated at Goldsmith’s College, University College of London, Centre for Cultural Studies (MA in Interactive Arts) and at the Edna Manley College, where she studied Painting. She was a Commonwealth Foundation Arts & Crafts Awardee in 2007, which was conducted at the Post-Museum in Singapore. She currently resides in Kyoto, Japan, where she is conducting postgraduate research at the Kyoto Seika University, Film, Video and Media Arts Department. Oneika also edits Art:Jamaica, a blog on contemporary art from the perspective of a young Jamaican artist.

Artist’s Statement

My current work consists of drawings, objects, digital animations and video. Characters and stories are the basis of my work. Many of the stories are my own inventions, reworked from the romanticized memories of images and tales of literary sources and mass media. My images are sequential and often episodic as I use reoccurring figures to suggest stories witch are in the Western psyche but filtered through my experience as a part of the Jamaican culture.  The work is often done as animations, mixed media on paper or as digital images intended for book publication or print. I seek to create a new narrative from old stories, which say something about my cultural experience and continued understanding of my self through the media.