Land of Plenty: New paintings by Ruth Piper

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LAND OF PLENTY: NEW PAINTINGS BY RUTH PIPER

Central to these paintings is the notion of transition and transformation that link to a strong sense of place both physical and psychological. Creatures of our environment, shaped by climate, geology and atmosphere, we are in transit from moment to moment negotiating and adapting to the demands of our immediate surroundings. Limited by our vision at any one moment we only know what we can see, everything else is fiction. Events beyond our vision are anecdotal and can only be imagined. We are alone but also vulnerable to a collective unconsciousness that influences constant tiny shifts in our constructed axis of reality. The process of painting is experienced here as a fictional layering of the past and present that can look back at the viewer with a glimpse of something hidden, not yet known or experienced. The title, ‘Land of Plenty’ was inspired by the complexities of an existential nostalgia for the ‘tranquility’ and ‘simplicity’ of another world.
Because the conditions of true happiness and contentment are fugitive and fleeting and depend on a consciously edited viewpoint of reality we are compelled to live life on the edge, forever in the gap between the surface and the underworld and the superficiality of first encounters with only a vague sense of what lies beneath. These paintings are located in the transitional mythological space between knowing and the unconscious, where dreams and reality merge.