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Ruth Hardinger
ArtworkResumeArtists Statement
 

My current works, employing powders of the earth and water, are concrete sculpture and watercolor on paper. They are autonomous works, although I may configure the sculpture or "drawing" in groups or in counter-positions to let them be at play in each other's space.

My sculptures, entitled Envoy, Extrusion, Extension and the conundrums, are cast concrete. I encourage their gritty surfaces and shades of gray. Cast in disposable plastic and paper packaging containers these pieces, in effect, render the disposable concrete, albeit transformed. They have an environmental and consumerist comment on how the disposable really is not such. Their stack-y building-block presence, their humpty-dumpty putting-things-back-together approach is about a re-building and re-ordering of the act of making. Fond of the elemental forces of gravity, weight, volume and material presence, these works are my pun on conventional sculpture and its formality, as they also may conjure up ideas of destruction and transformation, totems, pillars, anthropomorphic forms and still lifes.

My current work in watercolor on paper, WCW (water color wobbles), came about, in part, from looking at the movement of the night sky. I focus the palate on only the cool cerulean blue, warm Payne's gray and the white of the paper, and in that limitation expand the possibilities. While they explore repetition, patterning and motion, these works could be as an analogy to a fast-forwarding of precession, the earth's wobbling rotation on its axis. Copying the forms of the disposables used in the sculpture, these works echo the negative and positive space of those constructions.

My artistic experience is an accumulation of building and joining, theses words naming my process of finding. My current works are minimal and abstract in their visual appearance, and in fact, result from my long-standing involvement and interest in myth, archaeology, culture and primary structures. In that regard, my abstraction leans towards the symbolic rather than purely abstract, and at times my forms employ recognizable things which are then rendered out-of-context or displaced and transformed to go to work in my visual language.

My art making has always been an expression of a material-based and context-based experience which has led me to create in sculpture, painting, photography, printmaking, weaving and performance.

Melding the ruggedness of the earthy, weighty concrete and the intimacy and fluidity of delicate watercolor my current practice allows me a range of experience. My construction process follows the dynamics of the materials and the molds – the resultant piece takes shape when I find its rhythm. These works embody constant motion, the absence of black and white polarities, the fluctuation of reality and the imprecision of universality.

lesley heller gallery
16 east 77th street
ground floor
new york, ny 10075

t 212 410 6120
f 212 410 5340

gallery hours:
tue– sat 11am -6pm