Ruth Geldard
Add Ruth Geldard MA
Artist's Statement
‘Geldard’s work revisits the language of sculpture whilst incorporating many of the processes and materials that are the subject of much contemporary work. It explores how gender might affect perception of and interaction with materials. Investigation into the character and specificity of material relies on interventions to natural and manmade objects. Each intervention complies with a particular verb to act as a constraint. The collection, selection and manipulation of materials is designed to elicit a conscious response. The work is created from this process and subsequent responses thereby making the physical subject the realisation of this strategy. Observation of audience interaction with the artworks is then carried forward and forms the basis of future research.’
Duncan Brannan Visual Art’s Officer for Kent 2012your statement here
To Keep IV 2018
Material: Caen stone
Add your description here
This piece was made for the NUNO exhibition, in the Ovada gallery, Oxford, as part of my Bag project and a move into stone carving. The freshness of the untried medium, with its disciplines, constraints and unexpected freedom, caused me to slow down and express what I was beginning to work out: that a handbag is so much more than a physical or even mental receptacle, a sort of multi-functioning, psychic holdall. With hindsight a more accurate description would be as a repository for deeply held, unconscious memories and feelings and the things kept in them, mere cyphers, references, that like bag-behaviour itself, simply points towards something underlying.
I now view the first part of the project as an essential, worldly gleaning of information through interactive research including the making of disciplined, figurative work, Nine mixed-media images with accompanying personal texts, and the second part, a slow-burning process (over many months), a distillation of information, allowed to evolve into the actual work; a series of stone carvings To Keep I – 4
Artist's Statement
‘Geldard’s work revisits the language of sculpture whilst incorporating many of the processes and materials that are the subject of much contemporary work. It explores how gender might affect perception of and interaction with materials. Investigation into the character and specificity of material relies on interventions to natural and manmade objects. Each intervention complies with a particular verb to act as a constraint. The collection, selection and manipulation of materials is designed to elicit a conscious response. The work is created from this process and subsequent responses thereby making the physical subject the realisation of this strategy. Observation of audience interaction with the artworks is then carried forward and forms the basis of future research.’
Duncan Brannan Visual Art’s Officer for Kent 2012your statement here
To Keep IV 2018
Material: Caen stone
Add your description here
This piece was made for the NUNO exhibition, in the Ovada gallery, Oxford, as part of my Bag project and a move into stone carving. The freshness of the untried medium, with its disciplines, constraints and unexpected freedom, caused me to slow down and express what I was beginning to work out: that a handbag is so much more than a physical or even mental receptacle, a sort of multi-functioning, psychic holdall. With hindsight a more accurate description would be as a repository for deeply held, unconscious memories and feelings and the things kept in them, mere cyphers, references, that like bag-behaviour itself, simply points towards something underlying.
I now view the first part of the project as an essential, worldly gleaning of information through interactive research including the making of disciplined, figurative work, Nine mixed-media images with accompanying personal texts, and the second part, a slow-burning process (over many months), a distillation of information, allowed to evolve into the actual work; a series of stone carvings To Keep I – 4
