‘Collapse’ – Ruth Fuller exhibition

“A handful of types of elementary particles which vibrate and fluctuate constantly between existence and non-existence and swarm in space even when it seems that there is nothing there, combine together to infinity like the letters of a cosmic alphabet to tell the immense history of galaxies, of the innumerable stars, of sunlight, of mountains, woods and fields of grain, of the smiling faces of the young at parties, and of the night sky studded with stars.” *

For me painting isn’t a linear process, I find that what feeds into and drives the work seems constellation like, nebulous and strangely tangential to the painting itself. The things I’m painting are orbital – they’re not really what it’s all about. Standing far away (psychologically speaking) and considering painting from a distance, I see that the things circling the work are like a personal solar system, at the heart of which is a painting doing it’s own thing. I’m interested to see what I can find there – what the painting is when it starts to do it’s own work – because of, and despite, all the stuff I bring to it. I work with a sense that the painting directs it’s own course – I don’t plan it, it evolves. These paintings are a folding of personal and expansive worlds to singularity, a collapse that happens through painting multitudes of thoughts. I have a romantic notion that dissolving the innermost into the immense frees a separate ‘other’ painting, outside of my control and independent from me, allowing it to emerge in form and spirit – a sense of alchemy. It’s my way of asking the universe to paint itself.

Ruth Fuller

“Most of the better things we can think or say about pictures stand in a slightly
peripheral relation to the picture itself.” **

*Carlo Rovelli – Seven Brief Lessons on Physics
**Michael Baxandall – Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures

Room 14 , 10-4pm , Private View 25th October 3-5pm , Artist Talk 31st October 2pm