Ruth Waller

About the work

Over the past three years, since my retirement, and particularly since Covid, I have had the luxury of working intensively in the studio, exploring a number of approaches to painting which reflect my interest in engaging with an expanded sense of the material and formal potential of the tradition. Thus this exhibition features three seemingly disparate bodies of work: a series of vertical stripe-based paintings which play with rhythms and patterns of colour and tensions between flatness and spatiality; a series of ink studies on rice paper of fragments of botanical and geological specimens; and the most recent series of work which, through a process of improvisation, explores how botanical motifs and patterns of growth are gathered together to take the forms of bouquets and vessels. In this series I use small balsa-wood blocks to frame and give the works an overtly decorative, folkish quality, emphasising their objecthood- like small crafted furnishings.

About the artist

Born in Sydney, Ruth Waller is a Canberra-based artist who taught Painting at ANU School of Art & Design for twenty-seven years. She is represented in Canberra by Nancy Sever Gallery and in Sydney by Rogue Gallery. Her work is held in collections including The National Gallery, Artbank, Canberra Museum and Gallery, and several regional and university galleries. In recent years her work has reflected the pleasure she takes in the botany and geology observed in daily walks in local bushland and around a family cottage in the Blue Mountains.

Represented by

Represented by Nancy Sever Gallery in Canberra and Rogue pop-up Gallery in Sydney