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Ruby Reding
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Ruby Reding is an artist and researcher working with sculpture, poetry and archives to re-attune our relationship to mineral and metal extraction. Working across global scales of supply chains, she tends to the infrastructures and temporalities of dominant and violent governance that fuel mining, energy and commodity production. Through intimacy, closeness and abstraction, shapes and images in her works urge us to confront the relations that make up resource flows.

Paying attention to the materiality of metallurgies, her works enquire into our psychic and relentless pursuit for strength beyond the capacity of our bodies and organic life. Recent work focusses on aluminium industry as it emerged from the British Empire during WWI, rare earth magnets including neodymium for wind turbine production and tungsten for military warfare.

Often working in collaboration with scientists, academics and technicians, she conducts fieldwork to sites that are often out-of-sight to the global public or bound around carceral architecture. Get in touch at rubyreding@gmail.com if you are interested in a collaboration, coffee, conversation.

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feeling/folding the tributary (2023)


Fungus Press commission for Turf Projects
25 September – 31 December 2023



‘feelng/folding the tributary’ is a series of collages created from photographs of local government archives associated with the river Wandle, including pollution and flooding issues, from the 18th Century to the present day. The works also include details from Enclosure Acts, which privatised land in the UK, expelling people from their homes across Croydon in the 19th Century. These archives are woven with stills from recent films and iPhone photographs from the artist’s personal life, including small moments and hiking trips walking through different privatised lands.

Drawing on forms of ordnance survey maps, post it notes in archival processes and the tracings of material scanned, the collages map the awkward progressions between analogue and digital research. Including the partial presence of loved ones and inchoate fragments of bodies reinvigorates the cold and bureaucratic archives of pollution and land management that mask government inefficiency. The works also employ text used in film scripts, archives, dictionary definitions and everyday digital communication, playing with the connective tissues of language as it is variably cold and warm, close and far, tucked away in folders, typed or handwritten.