Ruth bateman Devon, United Kingdom

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Ruth Bateman’s paintings are a conflation of an internal and external landscape. Ruth has been striving to be heard. As someone who is neurodivergent, she has felt like an outsider for much of her life. Painting is an expression and celebration of her difference. It is a refusal to be contained or silenced.

Ruth has a primal connection to wilderness. She explores the landscape with her body: rock-climbing, mountaineering, cycling, feeling the earth rumble through her. This bodily experience of landscape is reflected in the kinetic way Ruth creates her paintings. Often working on enormous bedsheets, she allows herself to be entirely instinctive with paint. At the beginning, the marks are frenzied, the choices of colour entirely innate. She feels like an instrument, like a force is working through her. She is responding to what the paint itself is calling for. At the beginning, there are no rules. It is a bodily explosion: ‘sometimes I feel like I’m dancing with the paint brush and at others I feel like I’m stabbing with a knife,’ she says. This is tempered by a period of gestation. She will walk away from the canvas, allowing it to develop and responding to what it needs in a more considered way. There is an undeniable ecological element to Ruth’s work. The pain and chaos she is communicating is reflective of both her own pain and the planet’s. There is despair and destruction in these pieces, reflective of the wounds inflicted on the earth. The climate crisis and the way humanity is securing its own destruction is handled with honesty. These tumultuous marks suggest anarchy but also a surety and a resilience. Light occupies the spaces in between the frenzied marks, pulling us through, giving us hope. Amongst all the turmoil, light prevails. Green shoots will grow, the clouds will break, a voice will be heard.