I am an artist and researcher, working with sculpture, moving image, archives and participatory workshops. My work asks how we can attune differently to our experiences of agency and proximity under colonial and ecological degradation. I consider image-making as a site of possible intimacy, and try to offer counter forms of value to the way material is treated in mining and commodity circulation under late capitalism.
My research instigates sensory and submerged fieldwork methods at sites of environmental violence and scientific apparatus, such as water engineering sites, weather towers, mines and factories. Through different cameras in filmmaking and metals or textile in sculpture, I explore what kinds of gathering and gaze might repair our relationship to materials and each other.
My recent project on aluminium and bauxite asks why we are drawn to shiny materials, and the evolution of ‘lustre’, the light of minerals in geology, as emerging from white people’s draw to weightlessness, domination and control.
I have facilitated workshops in Rotterdam and London at Turf Projects including collaborative filmmaking in the field, river ecologies and poetics. From 2023–2024, I was Researcher in the Fine Art department at Goldsmiths, University of London. I have programmed exhibitions on energy infrastructure such as ‘shadow circuits’, at MaMA in Rotterdam.
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I work with sculpture, poetry and moving image to feel out our disconnection from resource supply chains, sites of infrastructure and each other. I draw on the elemental and rhythmic to attune differently to our experiences of agency, proximity and metabolism under late capitalism.
My research instigates fieldwork to sites of environmetental violence, sensing apparatus and infrastructure, such as water engineering sites, weather towers, mines and factories. I collect scrap materials and visit archives, asking how these methodologies can offer slanted knowledges and forms of material intimacy.
︎︎︎ Email: rubyreding@gmail.com
︎︎︎ Instagram
feeling/folding the tributary (2023)
Fungus Press commission for Turf Projects
25 September – 31 December 2023
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‘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.
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