Ruth Cleland

Ruth Cleland, from Auckland, New Zealand, is the 2009 recipient of the Wallace Art Award sponsored by the James Wallace Arts Trust. The Wallace Art Awards were established in 1991 for visual artists of outstanding talent from New Zealand.  Winning this award has been a big life experience for Ruth as it has brought her to America for the first time, for a three month residency.  She has enjoyed being immersed in the Studio Center community and says, “My studio practice can be quite isolating and having been out of an academic environment for a while it is nice to be in an artists community once again.  It has been very interesting and inspiring to meet and interact with such a diverse group of visual artists and writers."

The body of work Ruth is currently producing involves images of suburban shopping malls.  Interested by the uniformity of these spaces, Ruth has been documenting mall interiors and exteriors and pairing these images together, creating compositional relationships between various mall locations,  and to focus attention towards particular details of these spaces.  Through her highly detailed, photo-realistic drawings she explores the relationship between the image and her making process, translating a subject matter normally considered banal and sterile into a hand made object rendered with exquisite technique.   In these works, Ruth references digital media by pixellating signage and other identifiable details; a comment on news media, reality television, surveillance and paranoia in our current climate of constant security concerns and censorship.


While Ruth is predominantly drawing while at VSC, she has also made use of the printmaking facilities.  Grateful for the long residency, Ruth says, “My work takes a long time to make and if I had just been here for one month I would have only completed one piece.  These drawings are really time consuming and normally I have another job in order to pay the bills, so to have the concentrated time to get a body of work done is extremely valuable.”

 
photo courtesy of Howard Romero