Holding Time

About

Focusing on the relationship between ourselves and the environments we inhabit and move through, the exhibition aims to show the many shared avenues that their studio practice has taken. Themes such as landscape, geological matter, deep time, the body and birth, are presented as  constellations of memory, consciousness and hope.

Ruth’s brushwork has the messy, writhing quality of the natural forms she represents. At close range her scenes and isolated figures dissolve into patterns and surfaces, establishing striking correspondences between trees, leaves, stones, and waves. Hinting at natural forms and forces, Linda’s paintings impart the sensation of staying, looking and feeling. Both their work conveys the universality of matter as always in the process of silent reformation and resurfacing: in moving between the paintings, the viewer experiences a transference of energy as if from one manifestation of this underlying process to another.

The artist’s fascination with the worlds’ both visible and invisible forces is reflected in their handling of paint as a malleable material and physical container of time: resulting in works that are densely layered, allowing brushstroke and touch to carry a sense of energy and sensitivity for their subjects. In their sculptures, too, both artists favour materials that are malleable and have been used by humans for thousands of years, Clay and metal.

Ruth’s and Linda’s works are imbued with human experiences: encounters with powerful natural phenomena, and the imprint of new and unfamiliar places on the psyche and the body.  The two artists elucidate a tension, viewing nature as a repository of the deep past, but also viewing it as a timeless place that bears witness, an immanent, everlasting presence. Reading as immediate and primal responses to these encounters, the works hint at something just out of reach, beyond our understanding: a world of its own, complete in itself, independent of us. Yet this underlying world also runs through us all: we are ourselves manifestations of universal matter, like layers of sedimentary rock, holding time.