Ruth Miemczyk: New Work

About

Ruth Miemczyk’s painting employs a visual language that is experienced through colour, shape, materials, scale and a sense of space that is arrived at through the visible process and gestural act of painting. Her paintings take shape as a distillation of this visual language by adding, eliminating, changing the balance, weight and dynamics until she is close to being satisfied with the resulting work. Painting is a process of constantly looking, changing, contemplating, and discovering for Ruth Miemczyk.

While she may not be certain of how a painting begins, or where it will lead her, she can recognise when it ‘works’ and should be left alone. That she might have ‘finished with’ any single painting is perhaps misleading, as we can retrospectively trace similar configurations across works spanning a considerable period of time. The recurrence of certain shapes and gestures; notably the geometric shapes of diamonds, circles, squares and triangles is clearly apparent. It’s as if she has to look again and revisit a proposition or idea, but the resulting paintings emerge as persistent, elusive and wayward as memory.

Recently Ruth  has been increasingly interested in pairings or groupings of paintings. This is reflected in her method of working with several closely related paintings simultaneously which allows her a more expansive development of the visual language. The pairing of works is particularly fascinating, since it raises interesting questions about the uniqueness of any specific action, gesture or decision. The impossibility and futility of attempting replication, exact or otherwise, is quickly apparent. The diptych form raises formal challenges concerning (a)symmetry as an inherent characteristic, which cannot easily be disregarded, and whereby similarity serves to accentuate differences.

While Ruth talks about her paintings purely in terms of their abstract qualities of gesture, shape and colour, the viewer may be drawn to look for associative elements and it’s certainly possible to see how the paintings relate to landscape or architectural structures or spaces. That’s not to say that the paintings are ‘about’ landscape or architecture, or even a specific place or event. While Ruth will occasionally give a title to a painting that heightens an atmospheric reading of the work it can equally refers to the archetypal geometry and colour within the painting. Like many of the best artists, she manages to create a sense of clarity without destroying the delicate balance which must allow for ambiguity and expansiveness - without which the work would lack poetic spark.