Artist’s Statement

Ruth is a writer, psychotherapist and independent movement practitioner and facilitator, based in the UK. She was formerly a geologist. In her established movement-based psychotherapeutic practice, which is located on semi-wooded, regenerative agricultural land in rural Derbyshire, she explores how humans heal or mature in relationship with wounded and restoring landscapes.

Ruth’s artwork is primarily land-based, sited, and ephemeral. It intentionally seeks to ‘leave no trace’ as an ethic that echoes the outdoor code she grew up observing as a keen outdoors person. She often works with her own body or other bodies (human and non-human) as well as sound elements to create improvisational performances or conceptual installations that are filmed or photographed before being removed. She works in places and spaces that are biographically meaningful - most often rocky terrains - and explores intimate inter-relationality or small moments of connection in otherwise monumental landscapes, from boulder fields to active volcanoes, which are then captured and presented in small, screen-scale artefacts such as short films, zines and art prints (as well as her traditionally published books).

Ruth’s is an art practice of deep resonance that centres embodied listening and writing practices paired with creative, non-intrusive gestures of movement and reflective self-enquiry to deepen our interspecies relationality beyond the species divide, initiating new conversations and communion between our porous animal-mineral bodies. She is interested primarily with how deep listening and bodily interactions with the rest of nature (rocks, animals, plants, trees, water etc.) can support meaning making, empathic and compassionate connection, mutual recovery, and reorient us towards a more engaged and entangled relationship with the living planet in service to tangible restoration, and deeper guardianship between and across the species divide.