Hierarchies are present everywhere in our world. Perhaps this is because of one essential hierarchy that is often taken for granted despite its fiction: the superiority of the human above the animal and the material. Though this is not the place to discuss the genealogy of such a worldview, to say that it has shaped the way that most people live and the environments they inhabit is an understatement. A question for many artists of the past decade or so has thus concerned the ‘return’ of things non-human, and how to deal with their refusal of centuries of being underplayed. Broadly speaking, the artist is no longer handed the world as a loose collection of things that can be embellished, formally examined, or recontextualised. Finding herself among all this, Anna Ruth has not assumed the burden of reanimating once-dead matter or shuffling around the consequences of ‘entanglement’. Instead, she has documented the experience of chancing upon life in unexpected places.
It is easy to see how densely populated Ruth’s paintings are. Spread out across her many works, an assembly of animals, objects, architectural elements, and hybrids look back at the viewer. Their gaze is not welcoming or unwelcoming, but rather gleeful. It is not the outward glee of laughter, or even a smile; it is an inner glee. It is the satisfaction of apprehending the audience, being recognised for the first time despite having been there silently since the beginning. In this way, the ‘objects’ that inhabit her paintings are unhanded from human possession - they are no longer contracted by understandings that deem them as utilitarian, decorative or inanimate things. When you find them in her works, you are cautiously invited to observe a pulsing world, albeit one whose energy is but subtle by the time it reaches the human eye.
Yet for all their apparent life, the spectre of anthropomorphism undeniably haunts the characters in Ruth’s paintings. At the same time as she observes their energy she entertains the brutal possibility that they are merely projections. Ruth has spent increasing amounts of time studying anthropomorphic keystones, ornaments, and other decorative elements; a tradition that stems to the ancient reaches of history and is present in most human cultures worldwide. Especially given the anonymous craftsmen behind the gargoyles and green men of such designs, we must ask if these non-human personalities are in fact quite human after all. Could they be the result of an egoistic urge to extend oneself into the world, to make a mirror from matter?
Not satisfied with any one answer, the paintings in this exhibition frequently require the audience to double take. Where a hand touches a rope or a column seems to grin is not clearly defined, leaving deliberate room for poetic confusion. We would be wrong to mistake this effect for noncommittal indecision. Rather, a delicate balancing act takes place between the illusion of life and raw confrontation with it.
Text by Theo Carnegy-Tan.
Theo Carnegy-Tan is a curator and composer from London.
