Rose Heap
Ruth Thomas-Edmond
21 December 2007 - 17 January 2008

One colour loose and thin, changeable or slipping away, with moments of brightness and intensity.
Like light coming into a space, onto an object, causing our perception of things to shift, everything seems to reassemble, appear.
One piece joins to one piece joins to one piece.
Recognising this familiar sensation, time looping, experience shapes understanding; colouring this in.
A crack of light, a sideways glance, beautiful breath, the flicker of a smile.
The experience of scale, sensation and pause, adds up and has weight.

When I work in my studio I’m not thinking about art or even about a poetic experience, sometimes I’m not thinking much at all. The stuff that gets me in there, which engages me about the world around me, are the ways that people have of being in the world. Subversions, submissions, whims, contradictions, imaginings, rhythms, ways to cope, unhappiness, phrases, learning, motivations, desire…everyday things that are at once really important, and really fleeting and small.

In a sense this resembles a mathematical and physics-based understanding; complex systems, diagrams, simplifications, inter-relations of forces… so many interacting parts and successions, constantly evolving. Making these provisional objects and drawings is a way to share or highlight some of these ideas.

I suspect that people recognise themselves in these works. They call attention to both a wondering, imaginative, stillness or experience and a busy, driven to make sense of things we encounter, analytical strategy. It’s not a contradiction, or it is, but it doesn’t matter because it is the way people are.

And with this work it’s a chance to disengage from coherent logic, to look, respond on any number of levels, take an impression or a few thoughts, add to the accumulation of things that fill up your head. I suppose that it is aesthetic, but if it works as a model for disarming power systems, or promoting an audience to thinking about ways in which people do this in their ordinary lives, then it is a useful sort of thing.