Laura Skerlj
‘Liquid bodies’
Catalogue essay for Ruby Brown: Where Water Fills
In the coastal town where I grew up, there is a rip that runs from one beach to the next. It is known as the Shelly’s Express because surfers catch it, like a train, from the burly open water near the river mouth to neighbouring Shelly Beach. As a kid, you are warned about the rip and taught how to look for it, to see where the surface of the water ruffles like a long glitch or tear in the usual flow of ocean. If you happen to get caught, you shouldn’t swim against the rip but let it carry you until it decides for itself to let you go. I think about this rip as a long tentacle running parallel to the shore, muscular and lean and able to pull you under if you are not a strong swimmer or don’t know the area well. While the rip is tense, chaotic, violent even, there are also peaceful sections of water on those beaches. There are microcosmic rock pools with starfish and crabs and purple and yellow seaweed. There is a wading pool carved into the reef that is an empty stone box at low tide, bobbing with toddlers when half full, and completely underwater twice daily. There is an endless reel of silky waves.
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Every Tuesday night Ruby goes dancing in a large church hall in the inner north of the city. There is no choreography, the dance is freeform, but the sessions have a wave-like structure marked by five distinct stages. The music conducts the energy of each stage, and this affects the experience and how the dancers move their bodies. In the first stage, flow, the body is languid and warming up. In staccato, movement becomes detached, robotic, geometric. In chaos, which is the climactic point of the session, the dancers submit completely to the heightened energy of the music, letting go of control, shifting into a state that is euphoric, erratic, undone. Next, in lyrical, the mood becomes lighter, playful and jaunty before finally petering down to stillness, a meditative lull. At the end of the session, most people are lying on the cool wooden floorboards, elated, exhausted or both. Ruby lives for the ecstatic experience of chaos and she admits to occasionally leaving at its decrescendo, wanting to hold onto the feeling it unlocks. Often, she goes straight from dancing to her studio to make work with what the session has given her (endorphins, gestures, ideas, sensations, visions).
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For Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the body is in special relation with the world, as the permanent element of one’s perceptual field. When thinking about the role of touch within the “body schema,” he describes the occasion when someone’s hand touches their other hand. If their right hand touches their left, it feels as if the left hand is an object, yet the left hand feels the touch as a subjective experience; the left hand becomes both the object and subject of touch. Merleau-Ponty calls this phenomenon the “double sensation,” where flesh has a sense of reversibility, felt both within and from the outside.(1) Touching materials, especially fabrics, is an important part of Ruby’s practice; she selects second-hand and vintage textiles with specific patterns and colours but most importantly with a specific “hand feel.” The feel, pile or texture she is looking for changes between bodies of work, but velveteen has become a staple, and she spends hours sourcing tapestries made of this fabric from locations all over the world. When they arrive at her studio, she can finally touch them, and from her experience, she knows how that fabric will react with her other essential material, industrial gap filler. An odd combination, Ruby makes her works by tearing or cutting up these textiles, recombining them in new compositions, and then smothering them with this white substance. As in painting, it’s important that Ruby applies the right amount of gap filler; she must also work quickly as the gap filler dries within no time. In the minutes she has to work it, she makes her gestures into it with various tools, from the ends of paint brushes to flanks of cardboard to the hands of discarded Barbie dolls, pulling the gap filler across and through the pile, veiling and petrifying the soft material as she goes.
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Ruby is a Scorpio and, according to astrology, chaos can be life-giving for these zodiac signs, who belong to water, whose tenet is transformation. Rachel Armstrong said, “Hydrous bodies do not possess fragile egos. They are not alienated by the gargantuan, uncategorisable, or monstrous aspects of reality, and strike robust alliances with unknowns that enrich their portfolio of diversionary tactics in eluding entropy’s call.”(2) Of and drawn to water, Ruby is compelled by the unknown, using her hands to encourage the metamorphosis of materials, to bring about a sense of chaos that is as beautiful as it is cacophonous. When Ruby makes her work, she rips and cuts her chosen fabric in intuitive ways; she knows the brink of things, the border, the edge is where the potential lies, is where something ordinary can spin or flip into something mysterious. As per the surrealist practice of collage, Ruby chooses a piece of an image seemingly consciously but then ends up with something unpredictable, unconscious or dreamlike. The velveteen tapestries bare images of lions, kittens, roses, dancers, water bodies and jungle plants (to name a few) but, via Ruby’s process, they become all these things and none of them at all.
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When you look into a still body of water, you might see creatures, plants, rocks or glittery grains of sand. If a finger or limb touches or breaks the water’s surface, your clear view mutates, swirls, ripples, obscuring the scene. This doesn’t mean the creatures, plants, rocks and sand particles have gone but your vision of them is disoriented by the turbulence. Glen A. Mazis spoke of touch, saying it could be seen physically as being “up against” something but that it was also of “a communing, an experienced loss of intervening boundaries, a sharing of worlds.”(3) Using her “rip as line” technique, Ruby splits fabrics with their own histories and embedded imagery. She then reassembles these fragments to make disoriented compositions, led not by the logic of a grounded view but by a feeling of the world in motion. Her application of gap filler – a unique yet everyday material – is both an unusual paint but also a substance known for making things whole again. Through her process, she creates mercurial visions that reject a concrete or linear sense of reality for an experience of drifts, tides, currents and illusions.
Laura Skerlj is an artist and writer based in Naarm (Melbourne).
1. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible (Northwestern University Press, 1968), p.133
2. Rachel Armstrong, “Hydrous Bodies,” in Liquid Life: On Non-Linear Materiality (Punctum Books, 2019), pp.217–218
3. Glen A. Mazis, “Touch and Vision: Rethinking with Merleau-Ponty Sartre on the Caress,” Philosophy Today (1979), 23 (4), p.147