Ruby Wilson

Artist Catalogue

Virtual Exhibition

All The Times I Forgot You Were Near

This exhibition began as an investigation into what it means to care for the abject, dying body and the conversations that revolve around it, public, private and medical. To trace the presences and absences in these conversations and to acknowledge the importance of softening within this relationship between death, the body, the medical and the act of care. It has, in turn, become the most fundamental concern when conceptualising the mortal and medical body in my practice, to translate a search for softness and a safe acknowledgement of longing within such mortal matters. A longing for feeling. For the feelings that seem to simmer so deep in the belly, for all things tender and fickle and soft.

Much of the work I’ve created this year revolves around notions of preservation and pre-grieving. Reflecting on past experiences of loss, I found myself obsessively working with materials that explored a body that, at times, felt nothing but mortal. With that came explorations on what it means to prepare for grief, what it means to dive so deep into the body and its very tender relationship with care. The use of latex body casts has been my most consistent anchor in this conversation. This work began with castings of own body, as well as those of my family. Preserving some bodily sense of them that I would someday lose. Casting an area of skin or a scar still taught with memory or a hand that I would one day be unable to hold.

In the very nature of its materiality, the use of latex, its uncontrollable inconsistencies, exposed vulnerabilities and relentless materialism seemed to echo the exact midst of anxiety and desire that first drew me to the body. As soft imprints and traces of the body, it was important to dislocate the form that we know, to fragment its unity and disclose its uncontrollability. This body is one amidst the process of becoming undone, or rather lost in the act of becoming. Stitching these pieces together became an intimate act of care within my work, and yet there is undeniable violence in its outcome. It felt significant to translate both arms on the scale, both essential in the process of grief, both engaged in an ongoing conversation with one another.

Accompanying this latex body are various prints, and photographic transfers, mimicking similar ghostly imprints. The original collages were created from imagery that spoke specifically to some family loss, medical trauma or personal archive that held a sense of intimacy I wanted to work with. In conjunction with these were images taken from the public website of the UCT pathology learning centre. There was a conjunction between these two archives that I enjoyed working with. One private and one public, both intimate in their depictions of loss and body. A kind of resistance emerged between the cold hardness and anonymity that surrounds the medical body and a space of softness around the loss of a known, loved body. A resistance between feelings of repulsion and feelings of longing, between what it means to lose and what I means to preserve and to document.

Through this exhibition, it felt important to expose the sense of intimacy and empathy I felt when working with these bodies of work, to translate that there is an active and ongoing conversation with mortal and medical subjects in my work and that that conversation is a soft and intimate one.