' Ruth Gilmour has developed a practice around the tactile investigations of the immaterial. She orients silk and natural fibres, as manoeuvering bodies, to formulate linguistic connections encompassing environmental, feminist, and empirical epistemologies - through this process, the material takes a hermeneutical role.
From harvesting herbs, to pressing flowers into paper, to unravelling silk, thread by thread, the artist explores the power of the silent, the vulnerable and the slow. Experimenting with the deconstruction and reconstruction as both a conceptual and a methodological gesture, she retrieves links between embodied wisdom and digital consciousness.
Building upon her practice while reflecting on the specificities of her daily life, floral crops become central to this project, and their manoeuvres are captured, digitally reproduced and printed on silk woven fibres, to be unravelled again, in a ritual of retrieving original movement. The central composition is an 8-piece dynamic assemblage depicting and embodying this material entanglement. The 8 silk artworks capture a different moment of the wild flowers in the air, and they are presented untamed and disordered as a landscape fragmented spatially and temporally.
On the opposite side of the room, different materials are brought together to explore forms of coexistence. Gathered flowers and the scrap silk fibres are reimagined through knotting, weaving and paper-making processes, to compose an index of aesthetic, material, and poetic investigations on making as a research practice. Bridging autotheory, environmental ethics and crip-theory, the installation connects textiles, language, technology, ecology and disability.
The exhibition room is a deconstructed book expanded in space.The entries are threaded through the substance of their tactile existence. The narrative is dispersed and fragmented. The subjects are vulnerable bodies flickering through tactile experience and digital connections. The reader is invited to linger unevenly and discover the different chapters in their own time. '
Exhibition text by Pinelopi Gardika