RUTH PIPER
Land of Plenty
June - August 2016
RUTH PIPER
Land of Plenty
June - August 2016
LAND OF PLENTY
Paintings and works on paper by RUTH PIPER
Ceramics by SARA MOORHOUSE & MARIA WOJDAT
June - August 2016
Lane House Arts Gallery, Bath
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.
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.
Ruth is primarily a painter but she also works with drawing, collage and more recently 3D: processing and arranging selected information from photographic, literary and filmic references that are connected to her idea of external reality.
She is also interested in the notion of forgotten knowledge and past lives stored in our psyche that are linked to symbolic visual representations or manifestations triggered unexpectedly through the use of materials.
Read more about the artist here
To complement and contrast with Ruth's paintings we are showing a new range of ceramics by Maria Wojdat and Sara Moorhouse.
